Jackass isn’t designed to make audiences cry. Laughter, wincing, and nausea might be among the most expected reactions. But in the franchise’s wistful final installment, Jackass: Best and Last, the tears come easily.

Johnny Knoxville, the show’s co-creator and star, is first to break. He tears up on the first day of filming, reflecting on the rapidly approaching end of the series that defined his life. As the film continues, many of the cast get the waterworks going until the credits roll alongside a lengthy montage of a quarter-century of stunts and pranks. Then, it’s the audience’s turn to shed a tear, and in the New York theater where I watched the Jackass boys’ final victory lap, men in their 30s and 40s didn’t hide their emotions.

It has been 26 years since MTV’s Jackass introduced us to Knoxville and director Jeff Tremaine’s motley crew of performers, including Bam Margera, Steve-O, Ryan Dunn, Jason “Weeman” Acuña, Chris Pontius, and Dave England. The wildly popular show and subsequent films found its audience primarily in young men of the early aughts, much to the chagrin of uptight parents and Senator Joe Lieberman.

I didn’t grow up watching Jackass. Thanks to my older sisters, I was watching The Hills around the time that Steve-O put a fishhook through his cheek and acted as shark bait in the second Jackass film. I was introduced to Jackass for the first time last year, the same way many women are: by my boyfriend. In my clouded, Trump-era judgment, the idea of watching an all-male group beloved by teen boys make videos together couldn’t have sounded less appealing, but it became clear that Jackass has nothing in common with the manosphere influencers of today’s internet.

Beneath the frat-like antics, Jackass was utterly unconcerned with hypermasculinity. The men in the group might have been as willing to smash their face with a hammer as today’s looksmaxxing influencers are, but they didn’t waste their time espousing gender essentialist views or pursuing narcissistic self-improvement. The Jackass boys never spoke ill of women or queer people even amid the rampant homophobia and misogyny of their day. And despite what critics tried to tell us, they made no effort to tell their audience what or who to be.

The Jackass boys were never in a competition to be the strongest in the room. They weren’t the “tough guy” archetype. If the stars were competitive with one another, it was always to be, as the franchise title suggests, the stupidest — not the manliest. Jackass was entirely devoid of machismo. Stunts were performed in bikinis, sailor costumes and bunny ears, and almost always ended with a hug from the rest of the group. In Best and Last, we see an extended cut of Knoxville’s final dance with a bull that flips him into the air and briefly knocks him out. He is carried into an ambulance to a chorus of “I love yous” from his cast and crew.

“That’s why it works,” Knoxville told Esquire this month of the friendships at the heart of Jackass. “As much hell as we give each other, people can tell that we love each other.”

In the same interview, Knoxville, now a father of teens, acknowledged the growing far-right manosphere movement that bubbled up in the years he and his crew were off our screens, calling looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular a “fucking douche.” It might seem that a man who used a catheter for two years after tearing his urethra during a stunt shouldn’t be the authority on deeming someone a “douche,” but such is the great misconception about Jackass.

Clavicular made a name for himself by encouraging socially isolated young men to undertake painful practices to gain beauty and status. Knoxville and his crew undertook painful practices just to have fun and entertain.

There was a vulnerability to being in Jackass that the franchise’s stars never shied away from. It required a willingness to be knocked down, to get hurt, to be scared, to trust (and distrust) your peers with your worst fears, and catch it all on tape for the world to see. With that comes an intimacy that is rare to find in a space that might otherwise appeal to young men. While gender-obsessed manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate or Myron Gaines might worry about the implications of having physical intimacy with another man, the Jackass boys held on to each other tightly in torture rooms, stuck items up each other’s butts and attached shock collars to each other’s penises—all with consent.

In fact, Jackass happily embraced its latent homoeroticism. “I’m offended you just said a smidge,” Knoxville told Vanity Fair in 2010 when asked if the franchise was “a smidge gay.”

“We always thought it was funny to force a heterosexual MTV generation to deal with all of our thongs and homoerotic humor,” Steve-O said in the same interview. “In many ways, all our gay humor has been a humanitarian attack against homophobia.”

In an age where the creation of distinctly male spaces almost always relies on the degradation of women and queer people, Jackass seems oddly inclusive by comparison. The only barrier to entry is that you must be willing to be shot into a lake by a rocket launcher or slingshotted into the air while sitting in a poop-filled porta potty.