Avoidant Men and Their Prank Addiction
If there's one thing straight men love, it's seeing their closest friends in pain and degradation (hopefully naked).
Stunt and prank shows have captured a generation of boys who take pranks too far. With Jackass premiering in 2000, Punk’d in 2003, and Impractical Jokers catching on in 2011, there was clearly a huge audience for prank misconduct. Boys saw their rowdiest of dreams manifest on channel 15.
Clip after clip skyrocketed of men being pushed into lakes, scared onto the ground, and farted on. The stakes of humiliation were raised by putting it on our screens. But this kind of humiliation-based humour is nothing new between male friends.
The question stands: Why are straight men so obsessed with fucking with each other?
Hearing your dad talk about how he interacts with Bob, John, and Brian shows that there's always been a masculine obsession with trickery. The Impractical Jokers cast are well into their late 40’s now and still turning each other into human pinatas.
Growing up with brothers and in co-ed schools, I’ve always been surrounded by this macho mischief. It's not that I don’t find it funny. It's just that I don’t have a dying urge to punch my friends in the genitals every time we hangout.
Even when physical comedy is taken out of the equation, a running line of embarrassment seems to be men’s chosen communication style. Journal article, On Sarcasm, Social Awareness, and Gender, argues that differing genders use humour in completely different ways, “Among men, humour is used to reinforce competition and self-aggrandisement while among women it projects intimacy and support.”
This appearance of humour is an avoidance of vulnerability. Why talk about love, identity, and loss when you could take the shoelaces out of all his shoes? Emotional depth in male friendships is replaced with mockery. Men create psychological safety for themselves by using sarcasm over sincerity.
In 1986, the Coping Humour Scale found men tend to use more disparaging forms of humour, directed at others, when coping with tough situations. This scale measures how much one uses humour to cope with life stress.
Famous prankster Steve O from Jackass has suffered many injuries from pranks — and yet they were all met with laughter. In 2020, during the production of Jackass Forever, Steve O jumped onto a treadmill at full speed on a skateboard. He suffered from a concussion from hitting his head on concrete. On the ambulance ride to the hospital, the executive producer of Jackass says, “You know how you know it was good? You were knocked out, everybody is all fucked up, and (Jeff) Tremaine is just celebrating.”
There are obviously emotionally intelligent men out there, but finding male friends with the same maturity proves to be easier said than done. Men with a secure sense of themselves are often met with sarcasm when trying to connect. Many of these thoughtful guys rely solely on their female romantic partners for consolation. This can create an unbalanced dynamic and mean that single men have no shoulder to cry on.
All our interactions don’t have to be beautiful and significant. It's the complete lack of sincerity that has consequences. Most of the Jackass crew, notably Steve O and Bam Margera, fell deeply into depression and addiction whilst filming. Steve O spoke about this on The Iced Coffee Hour podcast, “I would describe depression as helplessness and in equal measure hopelessness ... it's dark man, it's scary.”
On the other hand, it's hard to not see these pranks as homoerotic. The way these men will constantly sack-tap or pinch each other’s nipples give off a sexual nature. While men use humour to avoid intimacy, at the same time, could men be using pranks to source it?
We’ve seen Jackass’ example of male friendships affect men in today’s media landscape. YouTuber David Dobrik shot into internet stardom in the mid 2010s for his videos using this exact type of degradation. He maniacally laughed behind the camera as his friends’ weight, age, and sexualities are turned into comedic material. The joy he gets from the power high has a sexual energy to it.
As we’ve seen before, this humour turned into a near-death experience, when in 2020 David Dobrik’s friend Jeff Wittek claimed he was slammed into an excavator while hanging off a rope attached to the bucket.
These pranks often entail making the fool look weak, fragile, and feminine. In the straight male fantasy these words are synonyms for fuckable.
Over the past decade, a plethora of men's mental health campaigns have been ignited in Aotearoa, including Movember, Men's Health Week, and Lads Without Labels.
Although, I wonder if men are actually pausing their sack-tap competitions to check in on each other.
You can’t prank your way out of emotional intimacy forever. Your pain will catch up to you. Put down the whoopie cushion and pick up the tissues. You may be the one laughing now, but the joke will eventually be on you.