The Aristocrats is a 2005 documentary about a joke of the same name which Wikipedia characterizes as
a taboo-defying, off-color joke that has been told by numerous stand-up comedians and dates back to the vaudeville era. It relates the story of a family trying to get an agent to book their stage act, which is remarkably vulgar and offensive. The punch line reveals that they incongruously bill themselves as “The Aristocrats”. When told to audiences who know the punch line, the joke's humor depends on the described outrageousness of the family act.
Because the objective of the joke is its transgressive content, it is most often told privately, such as by comedians to other comedians.
I saw the film shortly after it was released. I went with a friend. We saw it in the afternoon at a packed house in a theater off Union Square in Manhattan. It seemed like wall-to-wall laughter for the duration of the film. At the time it was the funniest film I’d ever seen.
It was still funny when I watched it on Netflix yesterday, but I didn’t laugh nearly so hard. I suspect that’s mostly because I watched it alone. Watching films with others intensifies the experience.
The film is simple. For almost an hour and a half you hear over 80 entertainers, mostly comedians, either telling the joke or talking about it. As the Wikipedia entry indicates, the joke is simple. The punchline comes at the end when the booking agent asks, What do you call yourselves? The answer: The Aristocrats. In a few versions the answer is different, “The Sophisticates.” For the first five or ten minutes of the film we never hear a complete version of the joke. All we know is the title, “The Aristocrats,” that the joke itself is extraordinarily vulgar, and that it’s a joke that comedians share among themselves, never including it in their public routine. The first full version we hear is relatively short, and, though it’s quite vulgar, it’s also quite tame in comparison to what comes later in the film.
“The Aristocrats” thus serves as a testing ground for comedians to strut their stuff among their fellows. The opening premise is the same for everyone as is the punchline. The difference lies in how you get from one to the other, the characters – two generations or three, any animals as well? – the acts and configurations, the timing and pacing, the inflections, the dynamics.
I wonder what’s happened to “The Aristocrats” in the two decades since the movie was released? In the “old” days, before the movie, how did a young comic first come to hear it? Upon hearing it the first time, how did they react? What about the first time they tell it? How much did they practice first, if at all? But now the joke is available to anyone who sees the film. Do comedians still tell it among themselves? Has anyone put it into the public routine even once, twice, seven times?
And why “the aristocrats”? What does aristocracy have to do with it? The ostensible premise would seem to contrast some conception of aristocratic refinement and high-mindedness with the unremitting earthiness and obscenity of the events being evoked. Yet tropes of aristocratic debauchery and perversion must be as old as aristocracy.
It's a very strange joke, is though that four-letter word were adequate to the phenomenon itself.