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I was five years into dating my now-husband when I discovered that the person I had spent five years dating had more to say about the early 2000s MTV show “Jackass” than any other topic. He possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of its stunts and pranks. I recall the moment the truth emerged: at the end of the annual Christmas party I host — a festivity that consumes 90 percent of my effort in a calendar year (the remaining 10 percent being parceled out to my job, personal relationships and health) — when it was time for everyone to go home.
I remember because another friend — seemingly about to go home — revealed himself also to be a fount of heretofore hidden “Jackass” knowledge. I remember my husband delivering an oration about the magic of the show — for whose benefit, it was not clear — describing it with a reverent tenderness I had previously heard him use only in my imagination, to describe me. I remember the men silencing my graceful Christmas playlist, and queuing up clip after clip from the show on YouTube. They watched these clips for over an hour. I remember this because — I can’t stress this enough — it was time for everyone to go home.
This kept happening while I worked on my profile of the “Jackass” star Jason (Wee Man) Acuña, which is in The New York Times Magazine this weekend. Men I had known for years would abruptly reveal themselves to have been passionate “Jackass” and/or skateboarding fans all along. (These fandoms, I learned, are essentially synonymous.) My boss. My boss’s boss. My friend’s husband. What I had perceived to be a richly textured tapestry of manhood woven from unique yarns of individual experience was in fact a bolt of plain fabric made up of a single fiber: “Jackass” fan.
When I heard of plans to release the fourth “Jackass” movie since 2002, I realized that I knew a little about a lot of people in the cast, but had never read an interview with Mr. Acuña, whose achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism, makes him the most immediately recognizable member. I wondered what the decades-long “Jackass” experience had been like from his perspective. That line of thought made me wonder more broadly about how achondroplasia affects his off-camera life.
I wasn’t sure we could print the name of the franchise in the paper. But I pitched a Wee Man profile, and my editor accepted it.
Initially, I had no good frame of reference for what Mr. Acuña’s personality might be like outside the brash stunts the “Jackass” crew performed on camera. I emailed his agent to brainstorm some activities Mr. Acuña and I could do together to break up the monotony of interviewing. This strategy is a celebrity profile fail-safe that guarantees a story will have action even if conversation is lackluster — it’s why I have played Pop-A-Shot in an empty arcade with Justin Bieber and gone whale watching with Tiffany Haddish.
The agent sent back a picture of Mr. Acuña pulling a funny face and holding up a large sign covered in hand-scrawled ideas: “Motorcycle Ride,” “Boxing/Kickboxing,” “HOT YOGA (IF CAN HANDLE).” He had agreed to spend three days with me; I figured that if we attempted as much of the list as possible, I’d walk away with an entertaining story about something.
Wee Man, I would discover, was up for anything. He was so outgoing and sociable that it was frequently impossible to determine, as he strolled around Southern California greeting everyone, if a given person was a close friend or a total stranger. Everywhere he went, he was received like a hero.
I left our three days together exhausted, and even more impressed by the scale of “Jackass” fandom. After the article came out online, I received a rare text from my baby cousin — his first, ever, about something I’d written. Another fan had revealed himself.
