Whilst Knoxville and crew do similar stunts with a hearty "Bah-har-har, it's only a flesh wound," Blaine seems depressed and frightened by his insatiably attention-seeking stunts and developmentally retarded by an ego fantasy that makes him see himself as a Mystically Accursed Spiritual Heavyweight. "I've got a bad feeling about this one," Brood-o the Unhappiest told Erik Hedegaard of Rolling Stone recently, when asked about his upcoming stunt. "When I think about it, I get these sharp pains in my head. I'm worried I'll end up in a wheelchair for life, broke, with nobody around me  It scares me  It's too late to fucking back out now."

Blaine's TV special last year, "Frozen in Time," was a fret-fest surrounding his three-days-in-an-ice-cube gambit. "At the end of this hour, they're going to bust me out. Hopefully, I'll survive," Blaine cryptically and shirtlessly informed us, his staring eyes as intense and worried as the identically intense and worried eyes tattooed on his shoulder. Blaine had announcers urgently intoning his release from the ice structure in breaking-news style with graphs and logos, like he was the Gulf War. The camera, with Live Emergency-flavored editing, hung on the face of Blaine's concerned model-girlfriend Josie Maran as she gazed -- with the heart-wrenching bravery of a fireman's bride -- on the self-inflicted disaster.

Announcers repeatedly assured the audience that the event was "potentially life-threatening" and frantically reminded us that Blaine could suffer such horrors as blood clots, hypothermia, or frostbite. Nobody bothered to mention that igloos are made of ice, and that ice insulates rather nicely, and that Inuit peoples have been building their homes out of large ice cubes since their ancestors crossed the Bering Strait. At last, when Blaine was dramatically chainsawed and carried out of the dripping ice-sarcophagus, there was no joy.

"Josie  my mind  my mind  There's something wrong," he moaned, as soon as his lips touched the microphone.

Oh no, God! we, Blaine's loyal audience, were to fret. The poor boy's entering the Tunnel of Light! His brain has freezer burn! He  he may DIE!

Blaine was quickly swaddled in Christly blankets by hundreds of screaming medical personnel and hysterically rushed into an ambulance to be treated for "disorientation." In a city like New York, where a man may wait hours in the emergency room to get bullets tweezered out of his liver, the spectacle of this massively overstaffed hospital pseudo-trauma was rather off-putting.

In the '70s, when the ratings got low on a sitcom, the producers would oink out "a very special episode," which wouldn't be funny at all and usually featured some frantic medical problem while the show's theme music whimpered in a minor key. Why must the popular and talented Blaine resort to this cheap, soap-sucking fearfulness? In a world where eating shellfish or cleaning your bathtub is "potentially life-threatening," Blaine, it is oft commented, could use an occasional bitch-slap.

Knoxville, who tended to emerge from his idiotic stunts with large bruises, broken skin, or a leg brace, used to downplay his maiming, to hoots of approval. The Jackass team, and in particular one unsung atavistic freak named Steve-O, seemed to revel in deep discomfort, searing pain and vomit.

Steve-O got his ass pierced and he bobbed for jellyfish; he snorted a live earthworm and pulled it out through his mouth in a flurry of dry heaves ... These, the public agrees, are acts of daring that require serious mental discipline. Knoxville commented in one interview that when he's enduring painful acts, they "get me so hot I feel just like Audrey Hepburn in 'My Fair Lady.'"

Blaine, on the other hand, told the New York Times recently that "when I'm doing the stunts, it's the only time I feel alive," giving the impression that his glamorous life is actually really, really heavy and miserable.

Strangely enough, the levity and criminal irreverence that the Jack-I (plural) brought to their worthless acts of self-mortification made them deeply inspiring in exactly the way Blaine keeps explaining that he wants his work to be. Knoxville comes across as someone who could do everything Blaine does, then have a dwarf wearing a king suit kick him in the balls afterward, and the worst that would happen is that he might fall on the sidewalk and writhe for a while. This kind of cap-and-bells-bedecked fearlessness is admirable, although one could argue that anyone who would don an athletic cup and let somebody throw cue balls off the roof at his genitals perhaps needs to be shot at by a real enemy for the advancement of God and country.

To rectify the wolf-crying that has become the biggest blot on his career and earn the awe and respect he craves, Blaine will eventually either have to do some kind of stunt that actually kills him or embrace advanced moronics himself. Perhaps a head-to-head combat TV special would be in order, wherein Johnny Jackass and Davey Blaine compete in a daredevil tournament of pain endurance and aggressive personal power. I envision the two of them, wearing bungee harnesses, being thrown at each other from separate points off the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Their respective camps would then swing them toward each other and have them joust with penitentiary-issue stun batons. It would be a remarkable battle: Blaine's supporters biting their knuckles and holding a somber vigil, Knoxville's drunken merry idiots attempting to chew through the cords and urinating down on him. At the end of the tournament, they'd both be covered with small, circular burn marks, but we'd know who had the real magic, once and for all.

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