Roger Alan Wade once slipped a beer and a copy of Kerouac’s On The Road to his 14-year-old cousin Johnny Knoxville and it was all downhill from there.

In the lean years leading up to Johnny Knoxville’s becoming the Co-Creator, Producer, and ruggedly handsome star of jackass, this former native of South Knoxville, Tennessee, routinely whored his hillbilly ass out to the television commercial industry.

Between cattle calls, Knoxville picked up freelance writing jobs for a variety of magazines, most notably Big Brother, a skateboarding magazine that paid him a mere pittance in 1997 to test out a variety of self-defense weapons on himself.

Realizing he’d finally found a welcoming and retarded home for his talents, not to mention a fine friendship in Jeff Tremaine, the mag’s Editorial Manager/Art Director, Knoxville was soon flinging himself off, on, or into any number of dangerous and/or laughable situations, including a bull, a car, a road trip with Rick Kosick, a rattlesnake round-up, a man-size half-pipe, and a fleeting appearance on Coyote Ugly—all of which eventually prompted the inspiration for a low-grade television series devoted to the celebration of all things silly, stupid, and just plain fun.

From the notoriety garnered on jackass, Knoxville soon graduated to a series of leading screen roles on The Dukes of Hazzard, Lords of Dogtown, The Ringer, Walking Tall, and John Waters’ A Dirty Shame, the last of which really opened his eyes to the wonderful world of “Bears,” the big, hairy men that occasionally have smaller, not so hairy counterparts called “Otters,” and the pages of American Grizzly they inhabit.

Despite his becoming a big-time Hollywood movie star, Knoxville never lost his taste for the ridiculous and frequently tagged along with Chris Pontius and Steve-O on the MTV show Wildboyz, as they traveled to the furthest stretches of the globe to make merry and act ugly. Ultimately, the reckless enthusiasm displayed by Knoxville on one such Wildboyz excursion to Russia was the catalyst for making jackass number two, a film that didn’t seem very likely at all following jackass the movie and his famously stubborn press statements.

Throughout the production of jackass number two, Knoxville was so red hot and ready to film there was absolutely no stopping him. Even when the movie was on the verge of completion, like with credits and titles and all that other last minute shit, he was still out in the streets with a cameraman, running face first into signs and wracking his undercarriage on parking meters, wholly committed to getting the most nonsense on tape as humanly possible.

Since then, Knoxville has somewhat settled down—well, relatively speaking—and is now super focused on his homemade T-shirt operation, cranking out dozens and dozens of one-offs for friends, family, and practical joke purposes.

With the website now in full production, though, a certain devious gleam has returned to Knoxville’s eyes and we’re all significantly more wary coming into the office in the morning, exceedingly mindful of any and all booby-traps that may await. Fortunately, most of the time he’s too busy fumbling around on a computer trying to master his next big stunt in life: logging onto the jackass website without the help of his daughter

(if you think we’re kidding, just know that Knoxville once did a search on Google to find AOL).