Steve-O: The ultimate anti-role model

There is no way to justify the dark yet very human indulgence of taking pleasure in someone else’s pain.

And the last thing kids these days need is another example of what not to do.

Yet, as stupid, foolish, idiotic, vulgar (feel free to add to the list) as Steve-O’s show is, if you have any taste for the twisted, it is nigh- impossible to look away from until you’ve completely peaked out your threshold for all things sick and wrong.

Yep, Steve-O is that good at being bad.

After watching the star of MTV’s “Jackass” “perform” live last Friday at the Big Easy Concert House, it’s hard not to feel, well, dirty.

Remember that old “so-explicit- we-had-to-make-millions” video of the woman who was hit by a train and how disturbed you felt after seeing it?

Well Steve-O’s “Don’t Try This At Home” live show is somewhere between a one-man-too-hot-for-TV on drugs and Beavis and Butthead at the legal drinking age.

Hopefully, anyone dim enough to even consider attempting one of Steve-O’s stunts would think twice. The show is called “Don’t Try This At Home” after all.

But if Beavis and Butthead were a danger to impressionable minds, Steve-O is a sign of the apocalypse.

Nearly 1,000 spectators watched in a combination of awe and utter disgust as Steve-O messed himself up and encouraged audience members to get in on the act.

The original jackass opened his freak show by busting a half-rack of beer one by one on his head and passing out fizzing cans to the audience while heavy metal blasted in the background.

And that was about as tame as it got.

After violently vomiting his brains out at one corner of the stage, Steve-O brought an audience member onstage to do a “Pete Rose” slide into it. And that was nothing compared to the guy from the audience who drank a cup of what appeared to be Steve-O’s urine. Steve-O turned his back on the crowd as he filled the cup (Lord, I hope that one was a fake).

“The guy that drank my piss is scared to touch the puke guy,” Steve-O joked.

While the majority of his tricks could have been somehow staged, there were few really impressive tricks. For the most part, I was thankful the camera operator did such a poor job with the giant video screens framing the stage (come to think of it, even that could have been part of the act).

There was a seductive blur between tricks that easily could be faked versus more convincing stunts, mixing how’d-he-do-that mystique with gross-out gags. Here’s an outline of the seven self-mutilating acts:

• Tequila shot trick: Steve-O squeezes lime in his eye, snorts a line of salt, guzzles a fifth of tequila, and then has a lackey spit in his eyeball for a chaser.

• Steve-O runs glass down his tongue and decorates his face and body in blood. He finishes by licking a mousetrap to stop the bleeding.

• Steve-O balances a butcher knife on his nose. Then he balances a stepladder on his chin, sits down, stands up and walks in a circle. Then, he does a barefoot backflip off the ladder.

• An audience member suspiciously named J.C. allows himself to be blindfolded and subsequently kicked where it counts. J.C. then takes what Steve-O calls a “nobody-catch-him stage dive” into the crowd. (Nobody caught him either.)

• Steve-O takes a stapler to the nether-regions (though you couldn’t really tell what he was doing with it).

• Steve-O takes several stings in the face from an emperor scorpion. (My friend who went to the show with me, the Infamous BZA, happened to study entomology in college. He said the sting of an emperor scorpion is comparable to a bee sting, but still…)

• For a finale, Steve-O’s animal expert dances with a cobra and smacks it on the head.

Perhaps the Steve-O phenomenon is proof that American culture has regressed to shamefully artless entertainment. Ultimately, it’s a poor reflection on society, and at the same time, one we can’t stand to look away from.