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If Jackass does make a run at the mainstream, it will be in part because where the WWE and [Tom Green] script gags to rouse an audience, Jackass is more reality based.

Jackass's surefire audience is teenage skater guys who perked up for the [Tony Hawk] cameo in Jackass The Movie; college frat boys getting ideas for pledge week (But again, heeding that warning); and new professional Alpha males working late on Monday nights but setting the VCR to tape WWE Raw. Its fans are MTV fanatics.

"It's significant that this is the MTV generation in a lot of ways," says [Forman]. "Even though MTV is not promoting it, we have to see MTV as part of the delivery system. We also have to acknowledge that a lot of those values are grated into the Jackass phenomenon."