The Aristocrats

Last night, for bugsybanana’s birthday, we went to see The Aristocrats, Penn Jillette’s and Paul Provenza’s documentary about the filthiest joke in the world. More like the skeleton of a joke, really. It goes like this:

A family walks into a talent agent’s office to audition their act. The agent asks to see what they can do. They then proceed to perform a variety of incestuous and scatological acts. When they’re done, the agent asks what they call the act. “The Aritocrats!”

Not much of a joke, is it? Well, that depends on how you tell it. As Jillette says in the film, the joke proves that “it’s the singer, not the song.” Each of the comedians they interview adds his or her own details to make the joke his own. One of my favorites was George Carlin’s version, which has the father of the family merely describing the act to the agent, but with a staggeringly repulsive load of technical detail. Whoopi Goldberg ads a bit of performance comedy to her telling, Sarah Silverman portrays her own family as the performers, the editorial staff of The Onion brainstorm a version of the joke (and come up with a brilliantly offensive new act), Matt Stone and Trey Parker provide a South Park clip of Cartman telling the joke to his friends, and on and on.

One of the trailers beforehand was for a movie called The Man, the premise of which is that a professional-looking white man is less believable as an authority figure than a street-talking black man. The world’s changed a lot since the days of Dragnet.