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'The Aristocrats' makes you laugh — and consider why

By PHIL KLOER
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It's not about the joke.

The staggeringly obscene and very funny documentary "The Aristocrats" seems to be about a bunch of comedians telling and re-telling a lame old vaudeville gag that lays claim to being the dirtiest joke ever told.

THINKFilm

'The Aristocrats'

A-

The verdict: @&%$!!# hilarious.

Director: Paul Provenza
Starring: Whoopie Goldberg, Robin Williams, Phyllis Diller, Don Rickles, George Carlin, Steven Wright, Jon Stewart, Drew Carey and many, many more.
Run time: 106 minutes
Release date: July 29, 2005
Rating: Not rated, but contains massive amounts of nasty profanity and detailed descriptions of sexual perversity.
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But really, in its heart of darkness, "The Aristocrats" is about where the audience draws the line between too-funny and too-far, about where people laugh, and then stop laughing and fall silent or emit a faint groan of disgust. "The Aristocrats" will make you laugh, make you squirm, and may make some people walk out in anger. It should make you think about where and why we draw our lines.

Seriously, if you have doubts about whether you can handle this nonstop barrage of filth, just don't go.

The joke itself is so lame that it's not spoiling the movie in the slightest to tell it up front. A manager walks into a talent agent's office and says he has a family act. The agent asks for a description, and the manager proceeds to tell him what the family does, which usually involves long descriptions of sexual depravity with each other, massive quantities of bodily fluids and sometimes playing of the kazoo in a way it is not usually played.

Disgusted and appalled, the agent asks what the name of the act is. With a grand flourish, the manager proclaims: "The Aristocrats!"

Buh-dump-bum.

"The Aristocrats" isn't a joke stand-ups tell onstage, for obvious reasons. More a secret handshake among comics, it's the shtick they break out at 4 a.m. as the party is winding down, a test of what a comic can do with its bare bones.

For 80-plus minutes, 100-plus comedians take this lame premise and pass it around like the basketball in the Harlem Globetrotters' warm-up routine. The joke gets inverted, perverted, analyzed, dissected and perfected. Behaviors that would gross out a bar full of drunk bikers are described in detail that can only be called loving by hip comics (Steven Wright, Jon Stewart), white-bread comics (Bob Saget, Rita Rudner), old-school comics (Phyllis Diller, Don Rickles) and people who aren't even comics (Carrie Fisher tells the joke and inserts her parents, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher).

There's an Amish version, a card-trick version, a cartoon version (the "South Park" kids), a mime version, a pseudo-feminist version, a Christopher Walken-impersonation version, and so on, ad nauseam. Really, truly, ad nauseam.

As a movie (as opposed to a topic), "The Aristocrats" is quite deft. Director Paul Provenza and his production partner, Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller, spent almost five years filming comics riffing on the joke. They edited and structured the finished piece so that it almost always keeps the audience off-balance, which helps increase the shock value.

When it seems there cannot possibly be any more variations to be played, there are. In these days of Internet porn and the Farrelly brothers as mainstream entertainment, sexual humor may not be as transgressive as it once was. So some comics experiment with adding more taboos to the mix — children with disabilities, racial epithets, 9/11 victims.

What violates our standards now is different from our grandparents' era, when the joke supposedly originated. The point of "The Aristocrats" — if it has one — is that there are always buttons to be pushed, as long as you know where they are.