Who knew about the "Aristocrat" joke

[Burma Jones]

I hope we can see THIS movie.............

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Even the notes for the Sundance Film Festival warned, "This is one of the most shocking, and perhaps for some, offensive films you will ever see." "So, ahh, strap in and just have a good time," said Provenza, who suggested that the film was really about love and joy -- and 89 minutes of the most scatological, filthy, disgusting humor imaginable. The prison sentence has not yet been handed down for the crimes against nature herein described by 100 comics, including Drew Carey, Phyllis Diller, Jon Stewart, Richard Lewis, Jason Alexander, Steven Wright, Robin Williams, Don Rickles, Paul Reiser and the cartoon kids from "South Park."

Plus Billy the Mime, a pair of jugglers, Carrot Top, a ventriloquist and his racist, misogynistic dummy, and the Smothers Brothers.

"The Aristocrats" is a documentary about a single joke -- a joke that has circulated among comics since at least the days of vaudeville, and, as Provenza likes to imagine, maybe back to Will Shakespeare getting wiggy in a bawdyhouse in Elizabethan England.

Yet this joke is kind of a secret handshake among comedians, downright Masonic, Da Vinci Code stuff, rarely performed in public, told instead in delis, greenrooms, bars. It is a 4-in-the-morning joke. It is a joke that would make gangsta rappers blush.

All right, this is the joke: A performer walks into a talent agent's office and says, wow, does he have an act, a family act. This is the setup. It is always the same. But then the joke teller proceeds to improvise, describing -- sometimes for many, many minutes -- the father, mother, kids, pets, grandparents, and their despicable, degrading, horrible acts of interfamilial, mmm, inappropriateness.

It is like the Kama Sutra penned by the Horned One. A cruise to the Ninth Circle of Hell.

At the end of the joke -- and this part is always the same, too -- the talent agent asks: "So what do you call this act?" And the punch line is: "The Aristocrats."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31639-2005Jan23.html