A former blue-collar working stiff, Ryan Dunn became an underground random hero of sorts soon after his appearances on the now legendary CKY videos.

Skipping down memory lane in typical profile fashion, Dunn met Bam Margera on his first day of high school in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and the two soon became best of friends. Together with Brandon Dicamillo they formed the “Camp Kill Yourself” crew and started making random videos comprised of skateboarding, stunts, pranks, and other skit-based nonsense. The CKY videos gained local popularity on the skateboard scene and the tapes blazed their way through VCRs across the country.

But where fame was rampant, money was not. Dunn was living in the dirty cellar of a flophouse and holding down two jobs as a welder and gas station employee in 2000, when Jeff Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville first approached the CKY crew to participate in the jackass television series. One jump into a sewage treatment tank later and Dunn was instantly catapulted into the annals of MTV stardom—simple as that.

For jackass the movie, Dunn took top honors following his willingness to take one up the ass for the team after Steve-O had a rare, sudden bout of parent-induced scruples. Where most had feared a homophobic backlash for the innocent rectal insertion of a car toy, Dunn was actually lauded with accolades far and wide for his open-minded stunt. Since then, the rest of the cast has rallied around their poop-chutes with even more reckless abandon (so much so, in fact, that the surplus of ass shenanigans was forced to spill over into jackass 2.5).

However, were it not for Dunn’s trailblazing spirit, it’s debatable whether anyone else would’ve gone on to so readily give up their butt as fast, if not faster, than a Catholic school girl on her first date.

Should Dunn mysteriously disappear one day and leave only a milk carton image behind, his “distinguishing marks” would consist entirely of the many tattoos he’s committed to his skin over the years. Fortunately, the success of jackass and various other projects has allowed him to become even more unconventional in his random tattoo choices of late. One such remarkable addition to the margins of his sketchbook body came on May 10, 2005, when he walked into a tattoo shop and got “5/10/05 Unbelievable!” scrawled on his foot. The significance? He had an unbelievably good beer that day.