The Aristocrats

January 18, 2006

Rated: NR Runtime: 92 min Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

So this guy walks into a talent scout’s office and says, “Boy, have I ever got a great act for YOU!”

The Aristocrats Thus starts the nastiest, most revolting, most offensive, taboo-shredding joke that you’ve likely *never* heard. The joke, by all accounts, got its start back in the days of Vaudeville and has been passed down to the subsequent generations of performers/comedians and they ALL know it well. So why haven’t you heard it before? Quite simply, nobody ever tells this joke to an audience. Nobody. Well, except for Gilbert Gottfried who must have nards the size steroid-infused grapefruits…but I’ll get to that later.

You could come up with several reasons why they do not tell this joke to audiences but there really are only two reasons of any importance. Firstly, comedians don’t really tell jokes anymore. They relate observations or go on funny rants, but never actually tell a joke. Secondly, most audiences couldn’t handle this joke. Even with an audience prepared for vulgarity (like an audience for Richard Pryor or Andrew Dice Clay, for instance), they would be seriously blindsided by this joke and some would likely walk out. Not good for business.

So what’s the point of it all? You learn from the people in this documentary that this joke is used, primarily, as a tool for comedians to impress and entertain one another. After the crowd has gone home and the comics are sitting around in the green room sippin’ on a few drinks, they break out this joke and do their best to impress and/or outdo everyone else with it. They can do this because the joke itself can be told any way you want to tell it as long as the beginning and the punchline remain the same. Everything in between is fair game.

The heart of the joke is the man telling the talent agent about the act that he and his family perform on stage. I really have to be careful about how I word things here, but I’ll try to skirt around the worst of it. The act, as described, is absolutely horrific. No, not in a Liza-Minelli-breakdances-while-screeching-old-Buddy-Holly-tunes kind of way, but in a truly repugnant, rapid-fire regurgitation of unnatural acts kind of way. And when I use the term ‘unnatural,’ please understand that I’m being very kind.

I knew a little about the content of this movie before I walked in and I had wondered how they would keep it interesting and/or funny. I mean, how many times in a row can you hear the same joke and still laugh? This was NOT a problem at all. You only get a few tellings of the whole thing and those that you get are ALL quite spectacular in their own right.

Among the notables would be: Bob Saget (yes, *that* Bob Saget) who demonstrates that he is the filthiest, most perverted comic in the business today. His version of the joke cannot in any way be described here lest I make several FBI watch lists. Then there was Gilbert Gottfriend. While performing at the Fryer’s Club roast of Hugh Hefner three weeks after 9/11, he had the audacity to make a couple jokes about planes hitting buildings. As you might imagine, he got booed a bit. So he takes off the gloves and starts telling this joke. In what is quite possibly the only documented evidence of this joke ever being told to an audience, Gilbert becomes a legend. The camera pans over to the other comics and they are stunned. Rob Schneider is literally in the floor, doubled over with laughter just at the idea that he’s telling this joke. If this show ever aired on Comedy Central, I’m sure Gilbert’s time was just one looonnng bleep. Then there was Kevin Pollak who does his impersonation of Christopher Walken telling this joke. This alone would be worth the price of admission.

The rest of the time is spent getting to know this joke and what makes it tick; getting to know the history of it, what makes it funny, why it is great as a cultural taboo marker, etc. This is where my only possible criticism would come, however. Just by the fact you get so many people offering their own variations or advice about the joke, some are bound to strike you as not very funny. Such is life. However, the vast majority of these little moments are quite hilarious in their own right so there will be no star deducted for this.

The big shame here (besides my own shame at laughing in several of the worst places) is that this movie will be very hard to find in theaters. The fatal problem here is that it is unrated and some theater chains have explicitly stated that they absolutely won’t touch this movie with a ten-foot pole because they know that if it WERE given a rating by the MPAA, it would have to be NC-17. This is pretty much because the MPAA doesn’t *have* a more extreme rating.

It is scheduled to go into limited nationwide release on August 12th, but don’t be surprised if you can’t find it anywhere near you. If this is the case, be sure to keep it on your DVD release radar as you’ll not want to miss it.

Posted by Alex | Filed Under 5 Stars, Bob Saget, Comedy, DVD, Documentary, George Carlin, Gilbert Gottfried, Kevin Pollak, NR, Penn Jillette