with red hair, eating a pear

Got around to see The Aristocrats yesterday. For those of you not familiar with what it is check out the trailer here. It’s basically a documentary on a joke which is supposed to be told in the most disgustingly filthy and disturbing way possible.

A man walks into a talant agent’s office…

I won’t even try to type down a version of it that I heard yesterday, nor will I try to make one on my own. I’d be banned from this blog before anyone have time to read it anyway. The filmmakers though, haven’t spared us anything when they show some of the biggest American comedians telling their own versions. Whoopi Goldberg’s version was great. A mime guy acted it which made me laugh so hard I cried. Billy Connelly, I couldn’t hear what he said with that crazy accent of his. Robin Williams and Chris Rock was surprisingly underused in the film. Eddie Izzard hadn’t heard the joke. Kevin Pollak does the best Christopher Walken imitation I’ve ever seen. Cartman of South Park even gets to tell the joke to his friends, but best of all… Bob Saget. He was the one with the longest and dirtiest Aristocrats.

The film doesn’t only show comedians tell the joke, it’s a documentary and has most of them commenting on how they think it should be performed and where they’ve heard it before etc. While it’s crazy-fun at some points and you laugh hysterically, it doens’t deliver as a documentary. Frankly, it’s a complete mess, with the only thread you can follow through the film is that the jokes keep getting more explicit. It never reaches any conclusions, which is probably because it never explores. I guess it’s not really the right format for something like this. But what is? The best parts are the stand-up episodes when I find myself folded double in my seat, but if it was only that, nothing more than jokes on top of each other, I could see the whole thing fall flat, and I would tire of it. Maybe this was the right way to handle it, after all… tough, I’m still not completely satisfied with the result!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Reviews; How I Like Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.