The Aristocrats

Full disclosure: For a short while, a few years back, I tried my hand at open-mic stand-up comedy. I never really made a go of it, because of the amount of effort required. Stand-up kind of looks easy, particularly if, like me, you don't really have a problem getting up in front of a group of strangers.

That's usually the barrier. You say, "I used to do amateur stand-up" and people always ask, "How could you just get up in front of a room full of strangers like that?" But that's not the hard part. The hard part is making original, funny or outrageous observations in a quirky voice that's uniquely your own.

In order to do this, and do it well, you have to tell jokes CONSTANTLY. Let's say you want to get a solid 30 minutes of material you know to be funny together, so you can do talent showcases or try to get gigs on the road. Even if you can come up with a hilarious 5 minutes of original comedy each week (and this is pretty hard to do, even if you're writing 45-60 minutes of total comedy in a week), that's 6 weeks of hard, constant, grinding work that pays shit or not at all.

It takes a special kind of person to go through that sort of ordeal. Someone fucking crazy and desperate for attention, probably with a neurotic need for affirmation. You meet these kind of people all the time at open-mics or comedy clubs...Anxiety-fueled weirdos who won't laugh at other comic's jokes, ever, but who insist on constantly cracking wise (off-stage, mind you) in the hopes that people will laugh at them.

Being in a room full of open-mic comics is like listening to Robin Williams perform the Book-on-Tape narration for Milton Berle's Private Joke File at three times the normal speed. Attempted humor keeps flying at you from every direction, but there's no way to process it all.

That's kind of the feeling you get watching The Aristocrats, Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette's attempt to...well, I'm not sure what they are attempting. Provenza and Jillette, popular stand-ups in their own right, gather together dozens of famous comedians, writers and humorists and ask them to analyze one of the comedy world's most fascinating and long-standing running jokes. The result is really funny, with many of these comics giving the jokes their own spin, and also a little repetitive. Unfortunately, it's not terribly insightful about comedy or being a professional comedian, which is what you'd kind of hope for with a film made up entirely of interviews with comic legends.



And here's the joke itself, in its most basic form:

A man goes into a talent agent's office and says, "Oh, boy, do I have an act for you."

The talent agent says, "Alright, tell me...What is it that you do?"

The man says, "Well, it's a family act. First, my wife and I come out, and have sex on the stage. Then, our kids come out, and they have sex with each other. Then, Rex, the family dog, he comes out and takes a shit right there on the stage, and me and my wife and my kids, we all roll around in it."

The agent says, "That's the most revolting thing I've ever heard. What do you call this abomination."

And the man says..."The Aristocrats!"

Yeah, it's a dumb joke, and yet it has stood the test of time. To hear some of the interview subjects talk, this is kind of a universal comedian cliche, the one joke every professional comic knows and has told.

The bulk of the interviews in the film find professional comics wondering aloud as to why this joke has lasted when so many other dirty jokes have been forgotten. You would hope, ideally, that this topic would provide a starting point for a look at the comic process, or a discussion of how comedy and comic standards change over time, or that sort of thing, but the conversation in the film never really advances beyond the immediate premise. It always comes back to repeated versions of the joke, and then comedians discussing how they like to try to top one another when they're off-stage.

The main idea a lot of people - from George Carlin to Bob Saget to writer Dana Gould - all seem to come back to is that the joke is like jazz. It doesn't matter that the punchline is kind of lame. It's all about what disgusting perversions the comic has the family act out, and how he manages to shift from the debauchery of the set-up to the ridiculously optimistic "Aristocrats!" punchline.

Everyone points to Gilbert Gottfried's telling of the joke at Hugh Hefner's Friar's Club Roast, three weeks after the September 11th attack, as a turning point. Because he wouldn't feel right mocking the horrible tragedy that had unfolded in New York, Gottfried made up for it by detailing a particularly ribald, disgusting version of The Aristocrats. In this scene, we start to see the appeal of this concept for Provenza and Jillette - this is comedy that exists only to explode boundaries. It is pure shock value without any attempt to dress it up with worldplay or wit. (As George Carlin sagely points out, shock is just another word for surprise...and all jokes are really based around the element of surprise).

Okay, so I've complained a lot that the film gets repetitive, and it does, but some versions of the joke are still pretty hilariously funny. And in a few cases, the way a comic tells the joke does in fact reveal a lot about their take on comedy in a more general sense.

Sarah Silverman tells the joke not from the point of view of the father or the agent, as most of the male comedians do, but from the point of view of the young daughter. Bob Saget makes it as fecal and body fluid-centered as possible, and also includes a sarcastic "Full House" reference, just to let you know he's cooler than all that now. Lewis Black turns the joke into a twisted pitch for a reality TV show. And Stephen Wright doesn't even try to get a laugh out of the actual joke, but adds a non-sequiteur aside at the end that's absolutely hilarious. Also, Doug Stanhope, a comic at whom I have never laughed, gets some of the movie's biggest reactions by relating the joke to his infant son.

But for the most part, my favorite bits of the movie have nothing to do with the actual joke "The Aristocrats." Monty Python vet Eric Idle got a huge laugh from me by trying to tell a different joke about a British pub and fucking it up halfway through. Martin Mull flatly refuses to tell the Aristocrats joke, and tells a different dirty joke involving the word "aristocrats." And a running joke about Joe Franklin's filthy, paper-filled office was more amusing to me than any combination of shit-eating family members.

So, yeah, it's funny, and seeing it as I did at a Midnight show at the Nuart was a lot of fun. But there's definitely kind of a navel-gazing aspect to the whole film, and when the movie tries to "sum up" the importance of the joke, it becomes painfully clear that, as a film, it's kind of shallow and meaningless. I mean, at the end, people are commenting on Gilbert Gottfried's take on The Aristocrats like it's the fucking "I Have a Dream" speech...No one had even seen the uncensored version except those in attendence until this movie opened anyway.

You know...It's just a dumb joke that comics tell. Doing a whole movie about it is kind of weird and indulgent, like how every group of friends thinks that their antics are just hilarious and that they should totally make a movie about how funny they all are together. Did Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza just get really stoned together one night and stumble upon this idea?

"Hey, you know that joke our comic friends always tell?"
"About the family that cornholes their dog and eats each other's bowel movements?"
"Yeah! We should make a movie where we all tell it!"
"That's hilarious! No way we could ever do it, though."
"Sure we could...All our friends are famous, and I'm a rich magician and Las Vegas personality!"

For a fascinating, insider's look at how professional comedy works, I'd recommend Jerry Seinfeld's insightful Comedian documentary, which also features some of the comics in The Aristocrats (like Chris Rock). If you just want some behind-the-scenes footage of comics cracking each other up, though, you could do a lot worse.