Now this, THIS makes sense! With this context, and now the others contexts including Nemo’s, as I listen to Gottfried’s, it is funny! Thanks, Exapno. I can be a little slow sometimes, I know.
I don’t know whether this is true nowadays, but it didn’t used to be. I don’t think I had heard of it before the movie about the joke came out. As Little Nemo says (see his and Exapno’s excellent comments), this was a joke that was told to other comedians, not to the general public; it was a sort of “trade secret.”
…so would there eventually evolve a new “Aristocrats” based on new sets of things you can’t mention in the public act? Maybe renamed “Family Values” or “Progressives” or something equally out of sync?
The Aristocrats joke is to me the comic equivalent of those “faster guitarist in the world” contests. It sounds fascinating to insiders as a way to show off your technique amongst other insiders. But to the general public it’s virtually useless. The Aristocrats is an unfunny joke that takes forever to build. Plus, since you will never actually perform the joke in public it doesn’t help improve your performances in any significant way. Just like guitarists who can play thousands of notes a minute, but can’t put that performance in any given song and aren’t good songwriters to begin with.
Thanks to all responders – altogether, highly illuminating.
I plan to do so, as soon as practically possible for me; just now, it isn’t.
I agree – I definitely perceived the joke from the first, as being a jibe about decadent aristocrats – as you remark, it is a pretty much proverbial thing that aristocratic and royal folk everywhere, have long been seen as tending toward degeneracy, vice, and debauchery; and as being very ready to indulge themselves in behaviour characteristic of same.
This is instructive – I had wondered a bit, how it was that those who speak English had so very much and widely, taken the joke to their hearts: I never thought that the joke (regardless of quite what, if anything, one considered it to be about) was all that funny. I’d figure, from this and other posts here, that it was the coming out of the film (2005, if I’m right) – plus consequently and / or independently, the joke’s being latched on to big-time across the Internet – which caused it to spread dramatically. I’m British, and first heard the joke fifty years ago from an American lad who was an exchange student at my school in England. With its long having been largely an “in” thing of the comic profession, I wonder a little, how it had come his way. Though he had an amazingly filthy mind, and considerable zest for sniffing out anything obscene…
Not really. Because the point isn’t to fix the joke. The point is to show that you can make people laugh even with a broken joke.
Or the ‘Sophisticates’.
“74.”
“You’re telling it wrong!”
“74…bubbala.”
“Ah! Now that’s comedy!”
Think of it as the humor equivalent of an Escher painting. The goal is not to make a working joke, but to make one that is elegantly incorrect.
Actually I see it more like long jazz jams, where you take a melody and improvise on it. Every musician will do it a slightly different way, The average listener will think “get to the next damn verse already” but those interested in they style will groove on the variations.
The joke can be turned around. Wendy Liebman told one of the funniest versions of the joke in the movie.
Youtube link spoilered for language:
Not so. If it’s a thing, it’s an American thing.
Lots of people outside the US, though, nowadays eagerly read / watch on the Net, material chiefly of US origin (such as SDMB); and pass on to their non-Net-surfing associates, stuff that they particularly like – but, point taken.
Oddly, the one I laughed the most at in the movie was the mime version. It’s one thing to describe disgusting acts and something else entirely to watch someone act them out on his own.
Which, I suppose, is the point - everyone knows the joke and anyone can spout endless filth, so making it unique and funny in the telling is the challenge.
I hate that joke (The Aristocrats). It’s a bore. I also watched the movie, and I hated that as well. I sat there waiting for one telling of the joke to be funny, and it just got more tiresome with every telling.
The joke is a “shaggy dog story,” and I hate “shaggy dog stories.” After they’re told, I just sit there pissed off at the teller and think to myself, “Well, that’s five minutes of my life wasted.”
But I also realize that a lot of the problem is just me. They say “The Aristocrats” was Johnny Carson’s favorite joke. So I have to realize that I just have a bit of tin ear when it comes to “shaggy dog stories.”
For anyone interested, Wikipedia has a full write-up on the joke under “The Aristocrats,” as well as a separate entry under “Shaggy dog story” explaining the overall category of those jokes and how they’re supposed to work.
Sarah Silverman’s version is that her family actually put on the act as described, and are the basis of the joke. Spoilered for language:
And, that’s precisely the point. The juvenile nature of the joke adds yet another humorous layer to the absurdest contrast of extremes. Not only is gross action being contrasted with sophistication; but juvenile humor is being told by professional comedians. It would be like finding Queen Elizabeth slumming with Borat.
The joke never goes over nearly as funny if told by an ordinary guy, even if he has comic talent and is creatively gross. All else being equal, the bigger the star, the funnier the joke. Imagine Johnnie Carson (respected big star and with a reputation for working clean) doing the bit—I think that would be the funniest rendition of all, even if his delivery wasn’t the best.
That was hilarious as well, easily my second favorite. His huge, insipid grin while acting out all these bits of the act was the icing on the cake.
The joke has multiple layers. On the simplest layer, the joke is in the punchline, in that the name of the act is incongruous with its nature. This is a very common template for jokes, with the punchline being something unexpected. In this case, it’s not a very funny joke on that level, but that level still has to exist to justify calling it a “joke”.
The second level is, given this thing that qualifies as a “joke”, how dirty can we make it? Yes, a lot of the humor is of the sophomoric “He said a bad word!” variety, but in the right context, and with the right presentation, that can be funny.
And there’s probably a third level, consisting of the contrast between the first and second levels. Just as it’s funny (at least potentially, to some degree) for an act’s name to be so different from the act itself, it’s also funny for a joke to derive its humor from an unexpected source: The joke is that the punchline isn’t the joke.
Of course, there are countless variations on it. For instance, one of the performers in that movie told a fairly straightforward version of the body of the joke, but then when asked the name of the act, said it was “The Cocksucking Motherfuckers”. Now we’re back to the first level of the joke, except that the “obvious” punchline has become nonobvious and humorous again, by virtue of the long tradition of the joke.
That was Wendy Liebman and actually she told an inverted version of the joke–the story leading up to the punchline was just about a nice aristocratic family doing nice fancy things.
