jackassworld

Way back in 1995, when we were all living the dream on Big Brother, Chris Pontius whipped up this simple but effective piece of art that read, “Keep God Out of California.” I believe we were on the verge of making the design into yet another unsellable T-shirt for the Big Brother soft goods line, but we’d already done gone and made one too many of those, as evidenced by the boxes of wildly unpopular shit taking up space in the warehouse (our most obscure shirt consisted of a poorly drawn penis slapped up against a woman’s face with the cryptic phrase, “Jay’s mom got hit in the face with a penis”). Plus, it didn’t help that our parent company, World Industries, had long since fallen on hard times and they were considerably less than enthusiastic about bankrolling any more of our unprofitable little fancies.

Thus the design fell into purgatory, where it languished for a good five years up until Pontius brought it back to mind when we were all running around Hollywood like mental patients on leave from the asylum, filming on the fly for the first season of jackass. From there he donned a goofy little Satan outfit, doused himself with eau de odeur fétide of brimstone, and took the strident message of “Keep God out of California” to the largely Hispanic streets of Downtown LA for public consumption.

Well, it didn’t exactly go over like a stack of hotcakes; in fact, most people wanted nothing at all to do with him aside from a few confused girls and a crazy old lady who kept cackling, “El Diablo! El Diablo!” over and over. Then again, the Devil Himself was sporting a rather prominent, if not nefarious package so some degree of reverence, fear or otherwise, was to be expected.

What most people don’t know—unless you were one of those lucky few that caught the original version of “Satan vs. God” on its premiere night—is that the segment ended in a goddamn holy war. As sure as the Pope shits, some random crusader came out of the woodwork (although he did seem to forget one of God’s cardinal rules, “Thou Shalt Not be a Foul-Mouthed Son of a Bitch”), snapped the sign in two, and proceeded to punch and push Pontius to the point of defending himself in the most Gandhi-like way possible. A minor feat on his part, I must say, having to deal with the limitations of a slippery-soled toy store costume versus a stark raving mad Christian.

Following the show’s debut, word came down from high up in the skyscraper that “Satan vs. God” was to be castrated of its money shot and the scuffle removed. Until now…