The Aristocrats

In this film some one hundred comedians, many of them well known, tell their own versions of a very dirty joke whose punchline is (usually) "The Aristocrats." This film is a documentary tribute to a joke highly revered among those in the comedy trade. At least so we are asked to believe.

Watching The Aristocrats was akin to sitting around a camp fire on a boy scout camping trip, telling and listening to incredibly dirty jokes that no one understood. Is there something exalted about this great tradition among comedians, this telling of the aristocrats joke? What I get from this film is that a large number of comedians are puerile, pathetic, and self-absorbed. There is nothing glorious about the tradition of the joke. It’s not even funny. (Some of the people who told it need to be on law enforcement watch lists--they may be dangerous to themselves or others—how they tell the joke reveals much about their inner psychology--violence and sex involving children, in one case unborn children, figure prominently in most of the versions). The only truly funny tellings of the joke, I thought, were Gilbert Gottfried’s (largely because of the context, some two weeks after the Sept. 11 disaster in New York) and the South Park version. And there was a highly offensive version by a mime that was pretty funny too.

Still, this film is overcome with its own cleverness, the false mythos of a comic tradition, the invention of significance out of nothing.