WhatzUp

The Aristocrats
by Derek Neff

The Aristocrats is the title of a documentary about the world’s dirtiest joke, and it is also the two-word punchline to that joke. How, you ask, can the world’s dirtiest joke end with the harmless punchline “The Aristocrats”? Simple: by front-loading all the vulgarity, and then ending with an intentionally ironic upward lilt. But I don’t want to get all analytic here. If you’re interested in hearing more about the joke that professional comedians tell only to each other (as the comedians themselves point out, stand-up acts rarely consist of actual jokes with actual punchlines) then this is your movie.

The set-up to the joke is very simple: a man walks into a talent agency to pitch his act. “What’s the act?” the talent agent asks him. “Well, it’s a family act,” the man answers. “And what do you do?” the agent asks.

Ah, but there’s the rub, so to speak. This is where the comedians come in and get creative (and gross, nasty, obscene, nauseatingly explicit and just generally socially unacceptable). And there are as many ways of telling the joke as there are comedians to tell it. (Legend has it that Chevy Chase once stretched the joke to half an hour in length, though most comedians keep it to a minute or two.) And we hear dozens of comedians including the likes of Robin Williams, The Smothers Brothers, Stephen Wright, George Carlin, Rita Rudner and many others tell their version of it. We see an animated “South Park” version. We see the joke told in mime. We see former Conan O’Brien sidekick Andy Richter tell it to an infant, using baby terminology to describe the most obscene acts you’ve ever heard come out of Richter’s mouth. You see Gilbert Gottfried tell it at a Friar’s Roast as a desperate way to divert an offended audience after telling a 9/11-related joke too soon after the tragic events of that day.

Just when you think you can’t stand to hear another version of the same joke, the movie cuts to a clip of Chris Rock providing us with a brief history of “chitlin’ circuit” comedy back in the days of vaudeville, or of Jake Johanssen poking holes in the logic of the joke’s set-up and punchline, or of George Carlin explaining why he feels the need to push the boundaries of good taste in his own act. I guess what I’m trying to say is that The Aristocrats, directed by Paul Provenza, isn’t so much about a single joke as it is about larger issues of social taboo, what’s funny and what’s not, the role that gender plays in comedy, etc. It’s never more than a minute or two away from making us laugh, and it’s never more than a minute or two away from making us squirm, but The Aristocrats is essentially a fairly serious dissection of what makes comedy (and comics) tick.