The artistic key to “Jackass,” if there is one, can be found in Mr. Jonze’s work. He began his career making skateboarding videos that paid as much attention to wipeouts as successful maneuvers, and his films (“Where the Wild Things Are,” “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich”) and music videos evince a taste for anarchy and a love of physical movement. While Mr. Knoxville and Mr. Tremaine both clam up at the mention of art, Mr. Jonze is comfortable riffing on the more high-toned relations of “Jackass.”  “When we first started, I knew that it was lowbrow comedy,” he said, “but I also thought that we were doing conceptual art in some way.” Mr. Jonze described his discovery of the performance artist Chris Burden as “revelatory.” In his most infamous piece, “Shoot,” from 1971, Mr. Burden arranged for himself to be shot in the left arm with a rifle. Mr. Jonze and Mr. Knoxville’s first collaboration was a video for the skateboarding magazine Big Brother that echoes “Shoot.” In a backyard “self-defense test,” Mr. Knoxville assaults himself with pepper spray and a Taser and finally, wearing a bulletproof suit, shoots himself in the chest with a handgun.  Performance artists like Paul McCarthy and Vito Acconci were experimenting with bodily waste and fluids long before the “Jackass” guys. There is also a street-theater aspect to “Jackass,” and the anti-social acting out has much in common with more obviously artistic provocations like Lars von Trier’s “Idiots” and Harmony Korine’s “Trash Humpers.” A skit in “Jackass Number Two” involves the placement of a leech on an eyeball. In case anyone doubted that it was a nod to “Un Chien Andalou,” the transgressive classic that opens with the close-up slicing of an eyeball, Luis Buñuel is thanked in the credits.  In the early days “Jackass” had the feel of a surrealist disruption. “Just the way it was put on TV without any host, without any context,” Mr. Jonze said. “It has no explanation for being. It just is.”  The shift from low-tech video to 3-D further erodes what remains of that underground aura, but it cements the place of “Jackass” in a tradition that the scholar Tom Gunning has called the cinema of attractions, a prenarrative approach to filmmaking emphasizing spectacle over story. For Mr. Jonze it was a good match of form and function. “The great thing about doing our movie in 3-D is we’re not trying to disappear into a narrative,” he said.  Mr. Tremaine said he appreciated the contradiction of “thinking of the dumbest things we could do with the most expensive cameras ever made.” But Mr. Knoxville was the last holdout, in part because 3-D cameras are bulkier and require an outside crew. “We thought it would affect the way we shoot and the relationships between the guys,” he said.  He also wanted to avoid gimmickry. “It had to be funny in 2-D first,” he said. “We didn’t want to just do cheap 3-D moments, like things jumping out at you.”  Some things do leap from the screen in “Jackass 3-D” — swarming bees, a party whistle extending from someone’s rear end — but the film mostly sticks to the “Jackass” formula: genital injury, close encounters with bulls and snakes, fun with body hair and adhesives. As usual, the most effective setups have a brute simplicity, like “The High Five,” in which unsuspecting dupes are knocked flat on their backs by a giant swinging hand.  For the first time, Mr. Tremaine said, the entire gang was present throughout the shoot. The pleasure of a “Jackass” skit derives not just from the stunt itself but also from the convulsive laughter that follows it. “We give each other hell, but at the end of the day you can tell we love each other.” Mr. Knoxville said. “Not that I want to make this sound like a feel-good movie.”  Ten years into the enterprise it’s hard for a “Jackass” reunion to avoid nostalgia. Most of the personnel are pushing 40 — as the closing montage emphasizes, with a flashback to their younger selves — and some have lived through public travails. (Steve-O’s battle with addiction was chronicled in an MTV documentary.)  Physical ability isn’t much of an issue yet for the aging crew. Mr. Knoxville said he was in better shape for this movie than for the other two. “The Three Stooges did it until they were 60,” he added.  But nerve is a bigger factor than endurance. For all its repetitiveness “Jackass 3-D” offers glimpses of a new source of comedy: the jackass in autumn, not exactly wiser but less reckless, cursed with foreknowledge, haunted by the pain reflex. “The moment before they do something, the pause is just that much longer,” Mr. Jonze said. “They’re really thinking about it, trying to convince themselves, and that makes it that much more funny.”  A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2010, on Page AR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Another Dimension of Idiocy. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The “Jackass” franchise goes three-dimensional in a new movie. Fans say it is comic anarchy at its freest. But is it art?