That’s exactly the motivation of Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza (who made the movie). Penn was comparing it to jazz improvisation.
Indeed. This highlights the problem discussed here, the Aristocrats is not a joke, it is an act. The act is the depiction of the outrageous act that is being performed by the group known as the Aristocrats. When well done the audience should have forgotten the initial setup by the time the straight line is delivered just before the punchline. The beginning and ending of the ‘joke’ are simply brackets and an excuse to recount the most obscene and depraved behavior in the context of humor.
Most versions I’ve seen involve a family audtioning for an agent. and there is some dialog at the start and end, like “What’s your act?” and at the end, “What do you call yourselves?” “The Aristocrats!”
So he, uh, took a big dump on his daughter’s face, there, Ed.
HOW BIG A DUMP WAS IT, JOHNNY?
It was so big, it was, uh, actually mistaken for a suburb of New Jersey.
HI-YO!
Heh. "A suburb . . . of New Jersey."
HAH!
Now, uh, Ed, here in this envelope is a four-word answer.
FOUR WORDS.
Four words, that’s right. “Made her whole week.”
“MADE HER WHOLE WEEK.” AND THE QUESTION?
After crapping on her made her day, what did anal sex do to her?
YOU ARE CORRECT, SIR!
It might be rather challenging to come up with a version that’s original; I mean, what’s left once you’ve exhausted incest, coprophilia, and bestiality (that you could do more than once at any rate)?
Style!
What about good old fashioned triple anal?
Kids these days. They think they invented sex!
I don’t know.
(Third base!)
Thinking to some extent along the lines of Wendy Liebman’s “backwards” treatment of the tale, as below…
[quote=“Frylock, post:40, topic:721244”]
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.
[/QUOTE]…with my having Tolkien stuff rather on the brain at present, what with there being a Tolkien thread current just now in “Cafe Society”; how about:
There turns up at a showbiz agent’s office in Mordor, a small bunch of orcs – male, female, and juveniles of both sexes (it being generally understood that orcs don’t have families as we understand the term); plus a couple of wargs, and maybe other kinds of nasty creature which orcs have as companions / familiars. The troupe’s leader asks the agent if he might be interested in their act, which they’re prepared to demonstrate; he tells them to go ahead.
The troupe go into a prolonged session in which they converse very politely together about innocuous subjects, with absolutely no foul language or angry quarrelling. Most considerately and with excellent manners, they pass the wine and canapés around, and offer each other weed for their pipes, and lights for same (no alcohol or pipeweed for the juveniles). They decorously pet the wargs, who gently give a positive response, wagging their tails. Nobody does anything of a sexual or excretory nature, or engages in any other sort of unaesthetic bodily function. In fact the whole thing is as polite and civil as would be expected at the High King’s court in Gondor. At the end of the demonstration, the agent – completely thunderstruck – is just able to ask what the troupe with their act, call themselves. The leader replies, “The Very Orkish Orcs”.
And then the guards burst in, seize all members of the troupe, and haul them off to be tortured to death; for of course in Mordor, decorum and consideration and polite speech and conduct, are as unacceptable (they are in fact, outright blasphemy and an abomination) as nasty and obscene speech and behaviour are, in societies of the kind to which we are accustomed.
the movie is very funny, I did not expect it to be that good with just 1 joke over and over.
I’ll have to see it again but what I recall was being annoyed by all the pointless camera cuts. It’s a bunch of guys telling a joke, not the fucking Bourne Identify, so stop that shit!
The punchline and even the humor of the joke itself is almost beside the point.
What matters is:
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For a long time, a young comedian knew he’d been accepted by his elder colleagues when one of him told him the Aristocrats joke. For a young comic, hearing that joke was like learning the secret handshake at a fraternity house.
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When a comedian had learned to tell that joke himself, in his own unique style, with his own idiosyncratic disgusting touches and details, he knew he’d arrived, and was now a master of his craft.
I didn’t notice that when I originally watched the movie, but yesterday when I was looking up Sarah Silverman’s version of the joke, it stood out to me like a store thumb. Drove me crazy.
I’ll have to watch it again, but from that clip I suspect the problem is that each version of the joke is far, far too long to be shown. So they had to cut them down to bits and pieces to get the flavor without making the movie into a week-long marathon.
…and they only used two cameras to shoot, meaning they could only cut back and forth between them. If they had three or four cameras, they could have gotten away with it, but if I recall, Penn and Paul were the people interviewing and shooting, and they are not video pros.
“What do you call your act?”
the Filthy Perverts!