'Jackass' is so funny it hurts

Watching a bunch of dudes in a movie do it is an entirely different story. "Jackass Number Two" is another scrapbook of bad ideas made excruciatingly and uproariously real. Those who seek to imitate such activities are, like the movie's merry gang of lunatics, crazy.

Filmed in appropriately crude digital video, ``Jackass Number Two" arrives only weeks after Steve Irwin's ugly demise at the point of a stingray, and the sight of these guys doing a stunt called Anaconda Ball Pit (two snakes, a tank of plastic fun balls, and three Jackassers) leaves you fearful for their lives. No one in the "Jackass" franchise appears to proceed with caution, which, of course, is the fascinating point of these adventures.

Officially, Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, and the rest of the "Jackass" crew are not scientists. But their comedy qualifies as research, and their research, consequently, deserves to be considered comedy. The subject is the human body, and their experiments challenge man's capacity for pain. In a sense, this makes them corporeal frontiersmen. In fact, the only person in the history of movies as devoted to subverting bodily norms is David Cronenberg. And not even he's come up with a character who can receive a beer enema with such glee. (Let's hear it for Steve-O.)

In ``Number Two," we see the body reach its visceral limit (expressed usually by vomiting), and we see that limit's psychological manifestation: fear. Margera, the most amiable member of the gang, runs for his life from a cobra and more than once is filmed near tears. (After Medicine Ball Dodgeball, he declares, ``That was fun. Let's never do that again.") Apparently, Knoxville, who is mauled by bulls on several occasions, fears nothing. As the leader of this outfit, he's like a gutter-rat George Clooney, and his crew is a skate-park Ocean's 12.