One hundred comedians tell the same dirty joke, 'The Aristocrats', which for may years has served as the bare bones for improv routines that go way beyond the boundaries of such things as taste. Comedians attempt to outdo each other in just how far they will go with the material, reinterpreting it according to their own style and whim.
So many American comedies tell their one joke over and over again to no great effect that it’s a relief to find a film that makes a virtue of doing exactly that. The documentary The Aristocrats, directed by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette, lets us in on a gag that’s been doing the rounds of the American comedy circuit for years. Apparently originated by Chevy Chase, the joke was intended as a test of comic craftsmanship, told after-hours amongst stand-ups and their immediate circle to make one another laugh, the very definition of an in-joke.
The joke’s bare bones are these: a talent scout goes into a booker’s office to recount the details of an act that he’s seen. The act involves a family (plus selected pets) performing the filthiest acts imaginable to, with and on one another. The booker wonders what an earth such an act might be called. The punchline… well, it’s one of those jokes where the punchline really doesn’t matter, to the extent that it’s thrown away in The Aristocrats’ title. What counts is that infinitely expansive midsection, and how far the teller is prepared to go in the pursuit of laughs or groans.
In previous decades, America’s top comedy talent has only been gathered together on screen for skittish, impersonal romps like It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Here, though, everyone from Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander (shooting the breeze outside a coffee shop) to Steven Wright (putting a typically bleak twist on the material from what looks like a corridor of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel) get to deliver this one joke with their own spin: consider these the Whoopi Goldberg variations, if you will.
George Carlin sets the bar in scatological fashion. Eddie Izzard rambles over it. Eric Idle initially tells an entirely different joke and screws up the punchline, then tells “The Aristocrats” in German, then retells his first joke, which turns out to be not particularly funny after all. There are ventriloquist, mime and animated versions of the joke, the last by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The joke is told as a card trick. Kevin Pollak does an impersonation of Christopher Walken telling it. Carrie Fisher does a Hollywood take on the gag, involving her mother Debbie Reynolds, that’ll make you look at Singin’ In The Rain in a whole new light. And so on, and so on.
What this anatomy of a gag proves beyond all doubt is that there’s a fine line between filthy and funny, one that varies according to personal taste. One sequence, in which the boorish comic Andy Dick describes a variety of outré sexual practices, seemed to this viewer especially juvenile rather than especially “adult”, demonstrative only of the mile-wide streak of childishness that runs through modern American comedy. Yet descriptions of such practices are precisely what I found so riotously funny elsewhere in the film. (Maybe Dick’s just a bad joke-teller.)
It all gets deliberately creepy at one point, suggesting certain performers tell the joke out of what seems a monomaniacal need for attention, to outdo everybody else in the room. The film’s most accomplished delivery of the joke is the reverse-angle replay on the material given by School of Rock’s Sarah Silverman, curled up on a sofa like a cat who’s just got the cream, in the character of a former Aristocrat who comes to realise she’s actually been raped. The most sober participant turns out to be Chris Rock, who recognises the joke is entirely the domain of white boys (98% of the contributors are, indeed, Caucasian), and that black stand-up comics, actively seeking to break taboos, would have told the joke on stage in front of a crowd rather than giggle about it behind the scenes like naughty school kids.
Still, the insistence on crossing all boundaries, on going at received notions of taste and decency from every angle, is very much part of the film’s make-up. This is about as comprehensive as any anecdote - funny or not - deserves, and you’ll almost certainly never want to hear the central joke again at the end of it.
Leave well alone, though, if you’re one of those who wrote in to complain about C4 showing the opening scene of Four Weddings & A Funeral without cuts; and you might also want to double-check if you’re planning on showing it to your children as a Disney film about jazz-loving cartoon felines.
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