Thomas Sutcliffe: Only men could be such jackasses

It being something of a bull market for anti-Americanism these days I don't suppose it will be very long before some social commentator attempts to treat the success of Jackass Number Two at the American box office as a symptom rather than a mere commercial statistic. Who could blame them, frankly? In the same week that Sean Penn's film of Robert Penn Warren's great political novel All The King's Men opened in cinemas, the citizens of the most powerful nation on earth overwhelmingly preferred to watch a celebration of reckless self-endangerment - the highlights of which include the administration of a beer enema, the drinking of horse semen and one of the team having a penis seared on to his buttocks with a branding iron. In truth, the commentators are going to be jostling with the Freudians to be first in the interpretative queue - dire warnings of terminal societal decadence battling with diagnoses of derailed transitional development and suppressed homoerotic tendencies.

Some perspective is necessary. It wasn't a great box-office week in America, so the success of Jackass Number Two is only a relative affair. And, good as Penn Warren's novel is, Penn's film reportedly doesn't come close to capturing its virtues. So comparisons with the last decadent wallowings of Imperial Rome (you can already find some, if you look in the right place) may be a little bit premature.

But something surely does need an explanation. How is it that behaviour so studiously witless can find such a large and devoted audience? This is Number Two, after all, so all those bums in all those seats know precisely what they're going to get - and they have presumably gone in the expectation of more, rather than less. More pain, more repulsion, more absurdly baroque hazard than the first film.

One thing that's clear is that it isn't the pain that's funny - even if pain is indispensable to the effect. American cinema audiences can be truly scary gatherings, but it seems unlikely that all those ticket holders are psychopathic. Show them footage of someone being tortured with a red hot iron and a quite sizeable majority of them, one hopes, would flinch away in disgust rather than cackling with delight. Show them a man volunteering for the process, on the other hand, and then plunging himself into a barrel of water to dull the agony, and they howl at the Chaucerian extravagance of the scene.

Other people's pain has always been a stock component of comedy, of course, from The Miller's Tale to old ladies who fall over at weddings and have their indignity apotheosized on You've Been Framed. But the laughs in programmes like Jackass, and its many imitators, are subtly different. Where You've Been Framed and similar camcorder disaster shows will often cut away from the consequences with a hypocritical speed - so that the rich humour of a seven-year-old getting a rake in the face isn't spoiled by the sight of a seven-year-old in tears - Jackass is as much about the aftermath as the prank itself. That's where the hilarity lies. That these yelping idiots have willingly colluded in their own agony (and in between the yelping are often laughing too). It's all about the reckless embrace of the dare. And if you really seek a significance in the film's success, it surely lies in the gender of its makers, not their nationality. Any country could produce a Jackass (and most have come up with imitations). But only men would actually think it worth doing.

A plea in mitigation of Hannibal?

The Bantam Dell Publishing Group have just announced that they are to publish a new Hannibal Lecter book, Hannibal Rising, some seven years after the last was issued. Thomas Harris's latest novel deals with the cerebral brain-muncher's early years, from the age of six through to 20, and though fans will obviously be curious about the young Hannibal's diet ("You're such a faddy eater! What do we have to do to get you to finish your fava beans?") it's a little unnerving to read that the novel will also explore the death of Lecter's family in the Second World War, with a particular focus on his memories of his younger sister, Mischa. It sounds suspiciously as if one of the great monsters of popular fiction is about to get a plea in mitigation, with post-traumatic stress disorder playing a big part in the defence case.

* The German film director Uwe Boll, notorious for turning mediocre video games into truly execrable movies, took his revenge on his more vituperative critics over the weekend by inviting them into a boxing ring in Vancouver to have it out, fist to fist. As a critic myself, I'm glad to say that four writers took him up on the offer - and one of them even managed to land a few blows in revenge for the damage that Boll had already inflicted in the screening room (the films are so terrible that detached retinas would be a mercy). Sadly all four contenders eventually lost, two through technical knockouts (aka running away), and two because Boll actually put them on the canvas. He said he had discovered a new respect for critics, but I fear the détente may not last beyond his next release. Round two will be in print, and I have a feeling the critics may be wearing weighted gloves.