director
Paul Provenza
producer
Peter Adam Golden
music
Gary Stockdale
editors
Emery Emery
Paul Provenza
cast
George Carlin
Billy Connolly
Andy Dick
Phyllis Diller
Carrie Fisher
Whoopi Goldberg
Gilbert Gottfried
Eric Idle
Eddie Izzard
Penn Jillette
Lisa Lampanelli
Richard Lewis
Bill Maher
Howie Mandel
Michael McKean
Larry Miller
Martin Mull
Taylor Negron
Emo Philips
Kevin Pollak
Paul Reiser
Andy Richter
Don Rickles
Chris Rock
Rita Rudner
Bob Saget
Harry Shearer
Sarah Silverman
Dick Smothers
Tom Smothers
David Steinberg
Jon Stewart
Larry Storch
Teller
Dave Thomas
Fred Willard
Robin Williams
Steven Wright
mpaa rating: none
running
time: 89m
u.s.
release: 7/29/05
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
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Bob Saget, of all people, reigns
supreme as the foulest, sickest mind in The Aristocrats,
a galvanizing new documentary. Known to millions for his innocuous
TV persona on Full House and America's Funniest Home
Videos, Saget -- who's notorious for his raunchy humor in
his stand-up act -- comes alive here in a way that shocks even
him. He tells a joke -- a joke legendary among comedians but
unknown to general audiences. The set-up is simple, the punchline
nonsensical and not especially funny. There's a guy, see, who
walks into a talent agency. Talent agent says, Whaddaya got for
me? Guy says, I got a family act. Talent agent says, Okay, what
do you do? And the rest of it is as vile and obscene as the teller
can make it, varying from comedian to comedian. The family's
act consists of them engaging in all manners of revolting behavior,
wallowing in the perverse, the incestuous, the scatalogical,
the bestial. Finally, the talent agent says, "That's some
act. What do you call it?" The guy says, "The Aristocrats."
No, I don't get it either.
And neither do most of the comedians. The joke is an anti-joke
-- an engraved invitation to fill the middle void with elaborately
vulgar riffing. The Aristocrats, directed by comedian
Paul Provenza and executive-produced by him and Penn Jillette,
is a loving act of meta-comedy, bringing us infinite variations
on the joke, dissecting it, critiquing it, ruminating on the
best ways to tell it. Drew Carey, for instance, always completes
the joke with a finger-snapping flourish, and is surprised to
learn that he's the only one out of the over 100 comedians interviewed
in the documentary who does that. Whoopi Goldberg demurs at first,
saying that her version would be too much like the others, and
then comes up with an infectiously funny bit involving foreskins.
Carrie Fisher brings her Hollywood parentage into it. Lisa Lampanelli,
recently seen as one of the harshest voices on Comedy Central's
roast of Pamela Anderson, cheerfully throws racism into the mix,
as do a few others, reasoning that if sexual fantasias shock
few people any more, racist humor still does.
The movie's ads proclaim "No
nudity. No violence. Unspeakable obscenity." But, in a way,
The Aristocrats features the most nudity and violence
in movie history -- worse than the worst porn or horror movie
-- because the outrages unfold in your mind's eye. The comedians
are successful at the telling (some aren't -- Eddie Izzard, for
instance) to the extent that they can paint a verbal picture
through sheer physical specificity. Bob Saget excels on that
level, almost sheepishly giving voice to the squirming atrocities
in his head. He's almost touching: he can't help himself. Given
carte blanche to let his comedic id run free, he visibly falters
twice, cackling face down into the table. A couple of comedians,
including Andy Richter, tell particularly nasty variations while
holding their infant children (who goggle at their daddies uncomprehendingly,
adding to the hilarious wrongness of it all).
Apparently filmed on the fly
on an array of camcorders, the movie is no great shakes as cinema,
and Provenza and Jillette might've aimed more for quality than
quantity. At times, The Aristocrats seems like nothing
so much as an archival project, gathering together generations
of comedians with this one joke in common. Time constraints,
I'm assuming, account for some of the omissions; many of the
comedians, like Chris Rock, appear only to discuss the joke,
and I'm guessing the DVD will be loaded with deleted footage.
(The movie feels like a work in progress, as indeed it is; at
the very end, we are encouraged to submit our own versions of
the joke for possible inclusion on the DVD.) Other omissions
were unavoidable and greatly pained the filmmakers, who would've
killed to have Buddy Hackett, Rodney Dangerfield, and Johnny
Carson (it was his favorite joke) in the movie, but they were
all too ill to participate at the time of filming. Provenza and
Jillette do try for variety, employing a mime, two jugglers,
or a ventriloquist to give their unique twists on the joke. The
South Park boys appear, with Cartman delighting in perhaps
the most self-consciously transgressive variation, poking fun
at the ultimate sacred cow of our times -- 9/11.
It was 9/11, in fact, that
led to Gilbert Gottfried's celebrated telling of the joke at
Hugh Hefner's Friars' Roast. It was only a few weeks after the
attacks, and the city's comedians were frozen, unsure of how
far or how hard to push. Gottfried, who never gives a fuck who
he offends, warmed up his roast with a 9/11 joke, and was met
with stony silence and a call of "Too soon!" from the
audience. Undeterred, Gottfried reached elsewhere for his edgy
comedy -- into the familiar territory of The Aristocrats. Sensibly,
Provenza and Jillette show most of it in the film. Everyone in
the room knew the joke and couldn't believe Gottfried was going
there, and the joke killed; Rob Schneider, in perhaps the sole
instance of his being funny onscreen, literally fell off his
chair laughing. The ice was broken, and Gottfried, through a
particularly scabrous path, had performed an odd act of catharsis.
It was okay to laugh again; it was okay to be filthy and vicious
again.
Does the joke -- or the movie
-- have any larger significance than being a comedians' in-joke
(or a document of it)? Well, it's not the sort of documentary
that will win an Oscar, nor does it have to be. Its very about-itself
unimportance is what makes it a liberating experience for its
own sake. Some commentators have theorized that Jillette, the
famous master of bullshit in order to reveal the mechanics of
bullshit, actually fabricated the Vaudeville history of The Aristocrats
-- the joke, according to this line of thinking, never actually
existed until this film, in which Jillette and Provenza invited
dozens of comedians to expound and riff on this theoretical joke.
If that's true, the joke is on us, but that doesn't invalidate
the joke's power to let people like Bob Saget swim deep into
their own wild subconscious and marvel at what bubbles to the
surface.
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