‘Bumfights’: the sickening viral craze of the 2000s
Right, so let’s get this out of the way, good and early: this article is going to liberally use the term “bum” in the American sense, rather than the British sense. So I’m going to have to ask my countrymen to please cease their tittering, at least until I get around to publishing my deep dive into the life and times of the fanny pack.
Because the term means something different depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on. On the bigger side, that has all the milkshakes, cars and gerrymandering, bum is a word for an unhoused person. A really, really mean one that we should have all steered away from using decades ago. However, since we can barely agree on anything these days, you’ve got to pick your battles, and in the grand scheme of things, this one may not be worth losing sleep over.
Especially because we seem to have got to a point where we can collectively look back at something like Bumfights and say with some authority, “That was a crock of shit“.
There are times when the 2000s seem like the building blocks of life in the mid-2020s, and then you look at things like Bumfights and realise that there are some things that we’ve left two decades in the past for a damn good reason. Even just the pitch of it causes nuclear-grade cringe.
Said pitch is essentially “what if we made Jackass as puerile and stupid as everyone thought it was?” After all, the golden rule of Jackass was that every ridiculous stunt would only happen to the people involved in the show. Bumfights began life as the worst possible version of that, where the (and the inverted commas put around this description should be visible from space) ‘filmmakers’ would find unhoused people desperate for petty cash, then give them a few bucks in exchange for filming them doing something dangerous, humiliating or, most likely, both.
It was grim, exploitative and cheap. Surprise, surprise, it became a genuine cult hit.
How did ‘Bumfights’ begin?
Bumfights was the brainchild (minus most of the brains) of Ryen McPherson, Zachary Bubeck, Daniel J Tanner and Michael Slyman.
The four garnered the majority of the footage themselves for what would become the first Bumfights DVD and formed the production company Indecline to release the first video in the series, subtitled A Cause For Concern. This became a cult hit, selling a quarter of a million copies within months of its release and creating a merch empire for the four creators.
Possibly knowing that whatever notoriety they had wouldn’t last (not to mention all of the police interest their videos were generating), the four founders of the Indecline sold up to two Las Vegas businessmen. Handing the reins of their budding media empire to Ray Leticia and Ty Beeson for $1.5million. If you’re expecting this to be the moment where Bumfights goes corporate, somehow it gets even more embarrassing from then onwards, due to the event that became arguably the height of the franchise’s notoriety.
You see, the producers of the show were invited onto Dr Phil to discuss the outcry their series had inspired. Someone claiming to be ‘Ty Beeson’ showed up dressed exactly like the infamous TV host, head partially shaved and all, as a way of showing that any accusation of exploitation they could level at Bumfights could also be levelled at most reality TV shows. A fair point, perhaps, but one that doesn’t absolve them of said exploitation.
What’s more, no matter how much we might want to believe we’ve left this kind of foul shit in the past, a cursory scroll through social media shows how much we still get off on videos showing the very worst humanity has to offer. At least with Bumfights, the victims were getting paid.