SHIT FUCK CUNT COCK PISS

It has been far, far too long since I've watched a movie in a theater (8 whole days!) and I broke my drought with The Aristocrats, a documentary by Penn Gillette and Paul Provenza. It is extremely funny, and deeply, deeply perverse: it is in fact the most perverse thing that I have ever seen.

(That said, it is not as perverse as 50% of what comes out of my mouth during any particularly intense Super Mario Kart session. I was reminded of this when the comedians' talking heads mused on how our culture is becoming desensitized).

The film is about a joke that is legendary among comedians, dating back as far as the golden age of vaudeville. Throughout, a cast of many, many comedy professionals (more than 100 seems to be a commonly cited figure) tells versions of the joke, discuss what makes the joke funny, discuss why the joke isn't funny, reminisce about the history of the joke, etc. I will not spoil the joke for anyone who's actually managed to avoid learning it, but I will make two observations: 1) it is not very funny in a traditional "setup-punchline" way, serving mostly as an improvisation exercise; 2) it is, at its best, very scatalogical, very obscene, and very explicit.

Certainly, an hour and a half of a single dirty joke would wear thin, but that's not how this film operates. Instead, it is a deconstruction of how things are funny. Most of the participants readily admit that the joke is mostly shocking, but most of them also tear into their version with sophomoric glee. And that glee is what makes the joke work, when it does - and it cannot be coincidental that the best versions of the joke are those in which the teller has difficulty in keeping a straight face (Bob Saget and Gilbert Godfried, in two of the most memorable versions, have to stop speaking in order to regain composure).

I will immediately state that nobody who is easily offended by toilet humor would wish to see this film. But for those who can make it that far, there is a surprisingly intelligent series of musings on the comedian's art. With the number of notable and less-than-notable talking heads involved, it could hardly be otherwise than that the film builds up a very complete argument on the implications of laughing at men ass-fucking their daughters. And I promise you, you will be laughing at men ass-fucking their daughters, no matter how much you hate yourself afterwards.

(What surprised me very much was how the film didn't build to a level where the obscenity was abstracted. Whereas in an extremely violent or sexually explicit film, there tends to be a point where the audience burns out and simply views the violence and sex as art object, there is never a point in The Aristocrats at which the notion of shitting in people's mouths becomes less disgusting).

If the film has a problem, it's how "documentary" the thing feels. Talking heads do not merely abound; they form almost the entirety of the work. To compensate, there is a weird editing motif, utilising a two- or even three-camera setup for the interviews, that put me in mind of Godard's famous dictum, "The cinema is truth 24 times per second, and every cut is a stupid gimmicky brainfuck."* Which doesn't make the subject less intriguing, although it does tend to make the film visually inert. The most shocking part of the film is how close it comes at times to making incest seem boring.

7/10