Let’s start at the beginning. I get requests to tell the joke, but I uniformly refuse. I don’t tell it because it is a bad joke. It’s very badness is what made it become an insider improv piece among comedians: if it were a good joke, people wouldn’t so cavalierly screw around with it. But when the joke is told to civilians all that is left is the crap. The only real fun comes from telling the joke to (a) a person that has no idea what The Aristocrats is (and therefore hasn’t requested it) or (b) among a group of comedians hell bent on topping each other. Anything in between that and it is boring. The comedians are revelling in the telling during the movie because it is a combination of the scenarios. The comedians are threre to hear them tell it AND they get to shock Grandma when she gets dragged to the theater. Civilians who ask me to tell the joke don’t really want me to go on and on, but a short version is hardly worth the telling.
What about the movie? It is a great movie. The joke is picked almost to death, but manages to survive the experience (though, as I said, it isn’t a good joke to begin with). What some people do is truly magical. There are a few truly awful versions and a number of comics tell such cookie cutter scatology that they will be embarrassed at how lame they sound. Again, though, great movie and I’m glad I saw it. And yet…
At the end of the movie what I mostly felt was robbed. Robbed of an experience that I think I am on my way to earning. I had heard the joke before seeing the movie, but I had never heard the joke. I never got to watch a comedian launch into a spontaneous version, initiating me into the cult. I was never part of a clique that treated the joke like a talisman and link to comedy history. Instead, even though I’m a comic I had to experience the movie as a civilian. So fuck you, Penn Jilette and Paul Provenza for taking that from me.
But how upset should I be? The Aristocrats feels like someone else’s joke - someone from a prior era. All of the comedians in the movie have been performing since the 1980’s, so they didn’t really feel like peers. I was like a Little Leaguer listing to reminiscences about the Three Man Lift. Maybe I would feel differently if I had the good fortune to have been drinking at the Olive Tree with Colin Quinn and posse when someone launched into it (in fact, I’m sure I’d feel differently if that were the case), but that wasn’t to be. I hope that my generation finds something new to bond over.
Since this movie killed The Aristocrats for us.
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The Aristocrats
