The Aristocrats, in which stand-ups take turns to tell the same filthy joke, might just save US comedy, reports John Patterson in Los Angeles.
I've just seen a documentary called The Aristocrats, about the filthiest joke in the world. It's like I've been bathed in semen, excrement, blood, pus and urine for 90 minutes. And I feel great! Some background: The Aristocrats is a kind of trade secret among comics - a joke they tell each other anywhere but in front of an audience. One comic in the movie likens it to a masonic handshake or an initiation test. The joke itself is less a joke than a riff. It comes with a set-up and a punchline, but the middle is all yours, an opportunity to soar aloft on wings of profanity and scatology.
So anyway . . . a man walks into a theatrical booking agent's office and says: "Boy, do I have an act for you, Sid!" And here the comic takes off on his own, describing an act so filled with fisting, felching, farting, shit, piss and household pets that the agent's eyes widen like saucers. The comic gets props for the precision of his disgusting details and for the plate-spinning genius with which he endlessly piles outrage on top of horror and sexual perversion.
At which point the agent, totally aghast, his cigar frozen in mid-air for some time now, asks, "Uh . . . so whaddya call this act?" And the guy pimping the act does a little "Da-da!" with his outstretched arms - as if he's just described something indelibly classy and uptown - "The Aristocrats!" Okay, not much of a punchline on paper, but in the right hands . . .
Magician and comedian Penn Jillette - half of the rudely facetious magic act Penn and Teller - has gathered nearly 100 of the US's best stand-up comics and let them run wild. Mario Cantone (who was Sarah Jessica Parker's abrasively campy gay friend on Sex and the City) makes his version about Liza Minnelli's new act, which will feature an entire Steinway Grand being absorbed within the Minnelli nether-parts - and that is about the cleanest version of the joke I can mention in a family newspaper. Bob Saget, by day the family-friendly host of America's Funniest Home Videos, had better pray that the network suits never catch up with the unfathomable, truly unsettling moral degeneracy of his version of the Aristocrats. Sarah Silverman even makes a rape joke out of it, which sounds horrifying until you hear it in context.
But the grand prize goes to Gilbert Gottfried, a whiny, horribly nasal geek-comic who was the first person to tell the joke in public, at a Friars Club Roast (an entertainment club event) for Hugh Hefner in New York in 2001. After one wildly misjudged 9/11 joke is booed, Gottfried, reversing gears in a nanosecond, pulls the Aristocrats out of his sleeve and riffs it until the audience is incapacitated by tearful laughter. The Friars Club gives him the ovation of a lifetime in appreciation of his audience manipulation skills.
The joke itself is half the movie; the remainder is composed of comics talking intelligently and lucidly about the joke, about timing, tough crowds, the limits of taste (there are none) and the nature of laughter and comedy. There are fewer laughs in these sections, but you welcome them, especially if you need a break from almost throwing up with laughter.
It's a long time since I laughed this much at American comedy, and it's faintly stirring to remember that The Aristocrats is a documentary on release at US cinemas. American comedy is in dire straits at the moment. Wedding Crashers, the most loudly trumpeted comedy of the summer - and the most financially successful - only gave up about 20 minutes of truly uproarious comedy, and then tanked for the last hour. Bad News Bears is worth a few gentle chuckles, but little else has really tickled the funny bone this year. All my recent classics are on the DVD shelf - Harold and Kumar, the 20-jokes-per-second masterpiece that is Dodgeball, and the DVD extras on Anchorman (though only a quarter of the movie as it was released) - but nothing so far this summer is going to get my $19.99.
But it's the DVDs themselves that may end up changing the face of American studio comedy. Many comedies that were contractually required by their studio backers to be released rated PG-13 are turning up on DVD in special "Unrated" versions, with all the filth that was cut out now restored - and they've been selling faster than cocaine. Wedding Crashers was supposed to be rated PG-13, but the studio took note of preview audiences' fondness for the cheeky stuff and released it as an R (for ages 15 and older). Smart move: it's now number one at the US box office.
This is how it was in the late 1970s and early 1980s: the classics of that time - Animal House, Caddyshack, The Blues Brothers - were all rated R, and no one gave that fact a second thought. They were all hits. If the American comedy film can shake off the PG rating and the ceiling it places on our expectations, then I'll be happy to call it progress. The Aristocrats may give the process a healthy shove in the right direction, so we should all be grateful for its noxious presence on the scene.