"I know no fear. If you introduced me to fear, I'd be like, 'who?'"
You've seen MTV's Jackass. You've watched Jackass: the movie, bought Steve-O's video and even caught a few disgusting episodes of Dirty Sanchez (which, for those of you who don't know, is a TV show which is like Jackass, only less subtle). They are but nothing before the mighty Crazy Monkey.
In brief, one-minute slots between videos on MTV2, the four members of the Crazy Monkey team get up to a variety of extreme activities, such as:
- Eating breakfast cereal without milk
- Wearing a winter coat... in summer
- Driving without a seat-belt - they do this in a deserted car park, reaching speeds of as high as five miles per hour. "We were going to do it with the seatbelt on and erase it in post-production... but Brendan insisted. The insurance guys went nuts."
- Pushing themselves in shopping carts - again in the car park. Includes an extreme near-miss with a lamp-post.
- Swimming directly after eating
- Waking somebody from an extremely deep sleep
- Jumping up and down on the bed
- Prank calls:
- "Hi, can we speak to 'Paul', please?"
"I'm sorry, there's nobody working here of that name."
"Okay, thank you... goodbye..."
extended sniggering
- Our heroes dial a random number. The phone rings... and rings. Nobody answers.
- Flagrant disregard of a "keep off the grass" sign
- Extreme skateboarding - they take turns lying face-down on the driveway as a skateboard is rolled towards their
faces, rolling out of the way just in time. Although they drew the line at doing it with fire (a small, lit candle on
the skateboard). "There are some places the Monkey won't go."
- Drinking orange juice straight after brushing your teeth - ewww! My personal favourite.
- Trying on clothes without intending to pay for them - this didn't get past the store entrance, since they were carrying a poorly-hidden camera. Instead they ran away.
- Foot-skating
- Other, unconfirmed stunts include wearing glasses without the lenses, talking on a cellphone beside a microwave and eating cucumber even though I don't like the taste.
"Gleaming the cube, man, gleaming the cube."
Foot-skating, a new kind of extreme sport, was also the subject of a twenty-minute documentary, "What is Foot-skating?
Skateboard, and then some", presented by the Crazy Monkey
team. Foot-skating is basically emulating skateboard tricks as best you can, without using a skateboard. That's right,
with your feet. It's basically extreme walking. You can do nearly
everything with foot-skating that you can with a skateboard. For example, you
jump with both feet onto the edge of a wall, balance, then twist as you jump off again. Or you leap fearlessly down a
flight of six steps. Or simply run along a wall. You can do it anywhere, pavements, open countryside, and you can do
amazing things in a well-equipped skate park as well, though in the documentary the foot
skaters were ridiculed by skateboarders and driven away by people who couldn't handle it. The documentary featured scenes of all four foot-skaters demonstrating their trademark moves, describing their unique styles and speaking frankly about their relationship with the
most extreme of extreme sports.
The entire show is done fantastically well. If you've seen Jackass, you might momentarily think you were watching something just like it, but once you realise what Crazy Monkey is really about, you'll actually find it ten times funnier.
The complete harmlessness of the Crazy Monkey team's activities, and their apparently deadly serious yet very witty performances make the
whole thing just priceless. Even the densely-worded disclaimer prefacing each segment is pretty funny.
I haven't seen Crazy Monkey on MTV2 in the last few months, and there's no record of it on MTV's official websites; it would be a terrible, criminal shame if the show has sunk without trace. Hopefully it will be repeated one day - keep your eyes open, you will not be disappointed.