Film review: The Aristocrats (2005)

This documentary about "the dirtiest joke I've ever heard" is not really as funny as I had hoped it would be. If you haven't seen the movie, you probably don't know the joke. It's supposed to be a joke that comedians tell each other, after hours, to entertain and show off for one another. That makes some sense, because the joke itself is not funny. I mean, the punchline is, "The Aristocrats," and it's a bit of an inside the showbiz world joke: "A man goes into a talent agent's office and says, 'Do I havfe an act for you.'" But anyway, the nature of the joke itself means that it takes some effort to make the joke work, which means that it is the sort of thing where one can show one's mad skillz. But many of the tellings of the joke go straight for the scatological, which is funny, but not quite funny enough to support an 80 minute documentary.

The film is still worth seeing, though, because some of the individual performances--snippets, really--are quite good. The Bob Saget telling has received a lot of attention, primarily, I think, because he's got such a squeaky-clean image. I really liked the mime version--my God, did I just write that?--and the card trick version, not to mention the "South Park" cartoon. Oh, and the Sarah Silverman telling. (What have I seen her in? She looks so familiar.) I was disappointed that the film did not include Chevy Chase, given that he's mentioned by others for his famous joke-telling parties where the idea was to tell the joke for 30 whole minutes. I guess that would have eaten up too much of the running time. (What was the last thing Chevy was in? What happened to him?) I also liked the "inside baseball" nature of the film, in the sense that it was comics explaining how they do what they do and how they understand what they do. The film also has a little of a historical angle, with older comedians (including Phyllis Diller and Don Rickles) talking about older comedians yet (one should probably say, dead comedians), and some discussion of the history of comedy as well as the history of the joke.

BTW, the theater was quite crowded, if not sold out. (Living in the big city is a little different. The same theater, not the same auditorium, was also full-ish for March of the Penguins a couple weeks ago.) But the strange thing was that the couple sitting next to us walked out after about ten minutes. I mean, the language in the film is really over the top, but still, I wonder, why? Because everything you read about the film says, "It's obscene." So you have to know what you're getting yourself into, right? Did they not know what they were getting themselves in for?