tederick.com reviews

• index
• tederick.com home

listen to our podcast about this movie

---

Legend tells of a joke that is not really much of a joke, so much as an ongoing pissing contest - and that phrase turns out to be remarkably, if tamely, appropriate. This joke is called "The Aristocrats," and begins and ends with a family attempting to impress a talent agent with the titular performance piece. What the family does in that piece is up to the comedian currently telling the joke, and comedians being comedians, the result is a litmus test of just how far a comic is willing to go to get a laugh.

Piss, shit, menstrual blood, regular blood, semen, vomit, bondage, rape, bukkake, necrophilia, pedophilia, incest, race hatred, xenophobia, and outright murder are all part and parcel of how American comics have been filling out this joke for several decades. It's a fascinating study in the power of context: if your next-door neighbour started describing some of the actions that serve as comedy canon fodder in The Aristocrats, you'd call the police, but coming from Robin Williams or Rita Rudner, stories of parents fisting their offspring or dogs humping dead grandmothers are par for the course. Comedians (though they rarely perform this joke in public, preferring to share it only among their industry peers) exist in a safe space that allows them to create the most degrading litany ever constructed, and be worshipped for it by their colleagues. The Aristocrats glances this way, occasionally stooping to wonder at what this means. The rest of the time, it just tells the jokes.

George Carlin tells the joke straight, but so scatalogically precise as to rip the first true guffaw out of the audience. The boys from South Park jump in with a brilliant short animated segment. Sarah Silverman ingeniously flips the joke to the first person and throws the structure out altogether, giving far and away the best performance of the joke in the whole movie. Bob Saget comes a close second - those who have followed his stand-up career (as opposed to his television roles) will know what to expect from the bluest comic alive, but everyone else will be stunned. A mime - a fucking mime! - performs the joke better than three-quarters of the speaking comedians in the movie. Finally, it is Gilbert Gottfried who soars in to give the film a surprisingly humanistic conclusion, by showing a 9/11 fundraiser audience a thing or two about tact.

In a surprisingly zesty 90 minutes, The Aristocrats completely dissects "The Aristocrats," offering both performance of the joke by about four dozen different comedians, and analysis of what makes it great by about four dozen more. The result of the former element is one of the longest, most devilish belly laughs you'll be treated to in the cinema in your lifetime (if you can stomach the material). This is the kind of film that you actually miss parts of, because you're laughing so hard that your own noise overwhelms the soundtrack.

The latter element, being the analysis, is what attempts to give the film its shape, and here, The Aristocrats is only half successful. There's the old adage that compares comedy to a frog: you can dissect it to see how it works, but you'll kill it in the process. "The Aristocrats" is dragged across the coals so many times that it stretches mightily, mightily thin... but fortunately, never quite snaps. The film, thankfully, continually draws the concept back to its basic principal (tell the damn joke) frequently enough to keep the documentary from ever becoming mired in self-importance. If this results in its being light on insight, fear not: it still remains a workable study of the comedian mind, enough so that it makes an amicable companion piece to Jerry Seinfeld's Comedian of a few years ago. That film was, to a surprising degree, about the actual process of living and working as a stand-up comic; this film is about the joy of the work: the sheer, jazz-like artistic fulfillment of taking something with boundaries, and stretching them to fit your own voice.