When your life work culminates to being known as a “Jackass”, you are expected to act as such. However, through the myriad of profanity and toilet humor, Steve-O shared poignant messages about drug abuse and his new purpose in life.
From the top, it was clear that this time, Steve-O would be putting on a much different show. In his previous visit, the star, whose actual name is Stephen Glover, came in tote with plenty of light bulbs and other destructive props. This time, he only brought his phone to record the audience reaction, and a smile on his face.
While his antics weren’t seen on stage, he is still up to his usual provocative stunts, as Steve-O is currently serving probation from a protest of SeaWorld in 2015. Steve-O climbed a construction crane and blew up a toy whale to protest the captivity practices of SeaWorld. After a fleet of 80 firetrucks and 18 police cars showed up, Steve-O was sentenced to 30 days in prison.
“Me and Shamoo in it together,” Steve-O said, laughing. He also said that he was actually aiming for jail time with the stunt. “‘Steve-O is going to jail’, now that’s a headline.”
Despite his sentence to 30 days in prison, Steve-O only served a standard work-days worth of eight hours in prison, but was promptly sent a bill for the firetrucks and police vehicles at his scene. Because of that bill, Steve-O expressed his gratitude to SRU for the opportunity to come back.
“I will never understand how institutions of higher learning hire me,” Steve-O said.
He went on to discuss his variety of other arrests, as he put it “When Jackass came out, that’s when my criminal record became colorful.”
In his past, Steve-O had been arrested for “Obscenity” in Louisiana following a stunt and also for drug possession in Sweden.
Although he was mostly lighthearted about his drug arrest, Steve-O quickly changed his tone to reflect the seriousness that drug addiction brings.
“I became a monster,” He said.
“It’s very relevant with everything going on like the opioid crisis right now,” UPB president Mallory Milberger said. “It was a fun twist on ‘it gets better.”
After a series of incidents terrorizing his neighbor, police arrested Steve-O and found cocaine in his pocket while he was high on other substances, to which he said that an intervention was necessary if he was going to continue living.
“You know your [drug] problem is terrible when you’re interventionist is Johnny Knoxville,” Steve-O said, who then checked himself into a psychiatric facility. “I thought it would be a good time to network,” he said jokingly.
Although he takes most things as a joke, sobriety was taken very seriously by Steve-O, as March 10th of 2018 will be his 10th year sober of both drugs and alcohol.
While he recanted much on his past, Steve-O also talked about his future, which hinges greatly on his new comedy special. The special was recorded, and edited so that anytime he talked about one of his stunts, a clip of it was shown.
Once the special is sold to the highest bidder, Steve-O plans to open the “Radical Ranch”, which will be a pet sanctuary; but he won’t be opening it alone. At the conclusion of his special, he proposed to his girlfriend, Lux Wright. Steve-O and Wright plan to open the sanctuary jointly and house thousands of dogs, cats and other pets and also plan to spay and neuter them.
