4chan Decided Bam Margera Is Doing Better Than Steve-O. They Might Not Be Wrong.

Bam Margera is winning. Relative to Steve-O, at least, and relative to where Bam himself was three years ago, and that is a sentence no one would have typed with a straight face in 2023.

A thread surfaced on 4chan's /tv/ board on September 12 sketching out Steve-O's current domestic situation: a small apartment, a roommate, stained floors, towers of empty beer cans, bongs, ashtrays, a fridge that doesn't close right. The thread wasn't meant as a tribute. It was meant as a contrast, and the contrast was Bam.

This is the weird thing about where Bam sits right now. The man who spent the better part of a decade being the Jackass cautionary tale, the one everyone worried about, the one who got cut from the movie, has somehow become the stable one in the conversation. He's hosting Fishtank Season 5. He has a sold-out shoe collab. He's reportedly sober. He did a Kick stream. He showed up in a death metal music video and it didn't read as desperate, it read as someone who is having fun again.

Steve-O, for his part, is doing fine by most accounts. He tours, he posts, he's been sober for years. The 4chan thread is not a verdict on Steve-O's life and this column isn't treating it as one. But the fact that the board is now running that comparison, and running it in Bam's favor, is genuinely new information about how the internet has recalibrated.

For a long time, Bam was the punchline and Steve-O was the comeback story. The CKY kid who couldn't get it together versus the guy who went on Dr. Drew and turned it into a brand. Now the framing has flipped, quietly, without any press release, just through accumulated clips and collabs and Fishtank appearances that made Bam look like someone who wants to be here.

Redemption arcs on the internet are usually performed. Bam's has been, somehow, mostly just lived. The 4chan thread noticed before the rest of the discourse caught up.