After opening to mostly stellar notices (including one
from our own Nathan Rabin) and staggering box office ($250,000 in four theaters!), The Aristocrats appears to
be turning into the latest documentary sensation. But at the risk of undermining
a colleague’s opinion for the second post straight (it won’t continue
fellas, I promise) I feel compelled to offer a dissenting vote. Much of my disappointment
comes in relation to the subject matter, which is impossibly rich: Through the
telling of one joke—a filthy vaudeville gag that’s been passed along
and improvised from one generation of comedian to the next—the film touches
on the fraternity between performers, the immense diversity of comedic invention
and delivery, and the constant shift in societal standards, for which this joke
functions as a sort of litmus test. For this occasion, directors/comedians Paul
Provenza and Penn Jillette have gathered a Rolodex full of the brightest (and
in the cases of Carrot Top and Bruce Villanch, not so brightest) comic minds in
America to offer some perspective and their own perverted twist on the joke.
The Aristocrats has the rough quality of a home movie, as if Provenza
and Jillette are inviting the audience to peek into some secret underground society
that operates well outside the acceptable bounds of taste. It all sounds great
and occasionally it is, but I can’t imagine a crummier documentary being
made from such a wealth of good footage. To give you an idea of what the cutting
is like, here’s what Provenza and Jillette would have made of the above
sentence: Cut to Paul Reiser (“It all sounds great and occasionally it is”),
cut to Richard Lewis (“but I can’t imagine a crummier documentary”),
cut to Sarah Silverman (“being made from such a wealth of good footage").
Pretty annoying, huh? For awhile, I was expecting things to slow down a bit; with
dozens of comedians on the slate, the film admittedly has a lot of introductions
to get out of the way. But the spastic editing never really stops, and it caused
my brain to shut down in the same way it does when I watch a Jerry Bruckheimer
movie. What’s lost is the precious continuity of individual performances:
This joke has a distinct three-act structure, with a special emphasis on the second,
but only a few comedians are allowed to tell it in full before Provenza and Jillette
cut away to someone else. And how effective can a joke be when it’s constantly
interrupted midstream? It’s no coincidence that the funniest segments in
the film are the ones that allow great comedians to simply tell the joke in full:
Steven Wright, George Carlin, an inspired South Park sketch by Trey Parker and
Matt Stone. The rest is just chewed-up hash.