The Aristocrats starts off in terrible fashion. Instead of the usual MPAA rating logo, they’ve made some phony ratings that says “This movie is unrated but protected by the 1st Amendment” or some garbage like that. The movie hadn’t even started and I was already telling director Paul Provenza to go fuck himself. No one is forcing him to get and/or accept an MPAA rating. No one is trying to censor his film. The 1st Amendment is completely irrelevant, other than the fact that Provenza mentions it is the first sign that he and pretty much everyone involved in The Aristocrats are suffering from serious delusions of grandeur.
There are a lot of funny people in The Aristocrats. I’m not going to take the time to count the actual number of comedians that appear in the movie, but the funniest talents of the last 40 years or so are represented in the film. Unfortunately, only two of them are actually funny: Billy Connolly and Gilbert Gottfried. Everyone else is a disappointment. I think this occurs because the joke The Aristocrats documents isn’t very funny. Nor is it difficult to craft.
For those of you who haven’t seen the film or heard the joke, it begins with a man going into a talent office to describe an act and it ends with the man announcing the name of the act as “The Aristocrats!” The description of the act is up to the individual comedian, but it is encourage to be as profane as possible. As an example, here’s my version of the joke:
A man walks into a talent agent’s office and says, “Boy, have I got an act for you! It’s a family act: me, my wife and our two children. It starts off with me coming on stage dressed as Skeletor, but with my dong hanging out. Then my wife comes out naked on roller skates. She sticks a slide whistle up her ass and starts playing Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Then my daughter comes out–she’s seven years old, absolutely adorabl–and she’s riding a pregnant Shetland pony. My son is stage left butt-fucking the corpse of Erich von Stroheim.Â
So, we’re all out on stage and the Shetland pony starts giving birth and I hang a loop of barbed wire around my dong and swinging it like a hula-hoop. My wife is still roller skating around and she’s about halfway through Act I when the little baby pony pops out. My daughter gets down on her hands and knees and starts licking off the placenta. My son is still off stage left butt-fucking Erich von Stroheim, but now he’s making ridiculous claims that the Prussian cavalry was involved in the assassination of Abe Lincoln. He’s shouting these accusations in a pidgin tongue of his own design. It’s kinda like a mix of Esperanto and Farsi.
By the time my wife gets finished with Act I, the barbed wire hula-hoop is starting to make my dong bleed, so I get the baby Shetland pony to come lick it up. My daughter is starting to get sick from all the placenta she’s been eating, so she goes and pokes another hole in the corpse of Erich von Stroheim and pukes in it. The Shetland pony takes a dump on the stage. Not wanting be upstaged, I also take a dump on stage. My dumps take a pretty long time (oh how I wish I could dump with the volume and velocity of a Shetland pony), so by the time I’m finished, my wife is all the way through Act II and starting into the finale and the kids are getting fucked by the ponies.
For the big finish, the kids set Erich von Stroheim on fire, then they ride the two Shetland ponies off stage. I kick my wife in the stomach and rub her face in my pile of shit. Then I pull the slide whistle out of her ass and as the curtain drops I ride my wife off stage, using the slide whistle as a riding crop.”
The talent agent says, “That’s terrible! What the Hell would you call such a disgusting act?” The man replies, “We call ourselves, ‘The Aristocrats!’”
See, it’s not a very funny joke. Nor is there any artistry involved in telling it. Just profanity, butt sex and poop. That’s all there is to it. But the people involved in The Aristocrats seem to think there’s so much more. They think it’s the comedy version of John Coltrane, rather than an incredibly easy and childish waste of time. Even worse, they think that the joke is so funny, that it’s worthwhile to have a gaggle of comedians attempt to explain why the joke is funny.
If you have to explain a joke, it’s probably not funny. And it’s certainly not funny watching Dana Gould and Paul Reiser attempt to explain why that unfunny joke actually is funny. And then there’s someone like Sarah Silverman, who’s too cool to just tell the joke. No, she’s got to tell a meta-joke about the joke and, by doing so, actually tell a form of the joke itself. It’s just the kind of faux-postmodernism that I find revolting. At least Emo Phillips had the decency to keep his unfunny version of the unfunny joke down under thirty seconds.
The Aristocrats is essentially a comic circle jerk. Everyone in the film wants to think that stringing together profanity, poop jokes and incest is some form of creative artistry. It’s not. Any idiot can do it. If anything, The Aristocrats shows us why so many of these comics have failed miserably making sitcoms or movies: they’re really not that funny when they don’t have months to write and try out jokes about how white people don’t know how to dance. Except for Billy Connolly and Gilbert Gottfried. They’re funny. As much as I hate reality TV, I’d love to see a show where Billy and Gilbert share a townhouse and operate a frozen yogurt–or frogurt, if you will–stand at a mall in Oklahoma City.
Gilbert Gottfried’s description of a man with Popeye forearms fisting a young girl was almost enough to give The Aristocrats a positive rating. But I can’t do it. I can’t reward a waste of a movie like this with even a half of a tiny head of Sergei Eisenstein. The Aristocrats is a flat-out terrible, unfunny movie. Avoid it. On my scale of one to five tiny heads of Sergei Eisenstein, I give The Aristocrats the dreaded evil tiny head of Sergei Eisenstein.
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