The Aristocrats (2005) directed by Paul Provenza is actually a documentary of sorts.
There’s a joke. It’s an old Vaudevillian joke that starts with the line “A man walks into a talent agency…” The man himself then proceeds to show the act he’s offering. In the basic premise of the joke the act is a family – mom, dad a couple of kids and a dog. The punch line is “What do you call yourselves? – The Aristocrats”.
It’s a fairly simple joke – but the thing about it is all in the middle. You can tell this joke for about half an hour. The dirtier and nastier it gets, the better. The middle part, the act itself, can be as scatological and as insane as you like. Actually, the worse it gets, the better the joke. Add incest, bestiality and violence and your golden.
So in this documentary we’ve got some of the best known comedians in the business telling versions of this joke and talking about when they heard it first and how it goes and what they’ve done with it and so on and so forth. It gets really, really nasty. Namedropping is almost impossible here, but we’ve got Jason Alexander, Hank Azaria, George Carlin, Billy Connolly, Carrie Fisher, Whoopi Goldberg, Eric Idle, Eddie Izzard, Bill Maheer, Penn & Teller, Paul Resier, Robin Williams, Drew Carey, Bob Saget and so on and so forth. Did I mention the mime and the ventriloquist? No? well, there are those too.
This is a comedians’ joke. It’s a very in-house thing, like a mental exercise, a meta-joke, if you like.
Me, personally? I understand what it is all about in that slightly twisted intellectual way that is not really conducive to laughter, but that gets you something else when it comes to the nature of things.
Comedy is hard. Being funny in a way that actually manages to make people laugh is not something that should be taken lightly. This is not a funny joke because it is a funny joke, it is like jazz music, a variation on a theme that lets you see the what the artist has to bring to the table. And you have to understand something about the context of all this – the censorship in movies and television have a lot to do with why all these comedians get a little giddy in the telling of this extremely blue joke.
Some of the renditions in this documentary are pretty sickening. Like many documentaries you should probably not have dinner while watching it if you’re sensitive. It’s also the kind of thing that startles a laugh out of you, because you don’t know what else to do with it. It’s about boundaries and limits and how far you can take it, and of course that’s going to be off-putting.
I tend to view a lot of supposed comedy with that automatic distance that you get when you can put stuff together before it happens. Sitcoms spare me the trouble of laughing myself with the canned laughter they supply and most comedies just make me shake my head. I come from a long line of sarcastic snide verbal joking and that means I lean towards the absurd anyway.
For me this documentary serves the purpose of dissecting where the taboo boundaries lie today. In a world of censorship and polite and cute comedy like Friends, or Full House this joke and the telling of it is clearly cathartic, at least for the comedians.
I actually think watching this documentary is a good idea. You learn something about the nature of comedy, censorship – both internalized and societal – and about what makes you laugh as a pure defence mechanism. Then again, I like it when things get complicated, so if you’re looking for just “funny” you should probably stay away from this one.
Mule
Mule at the Movies 