Yet there are almost as many moments of really awful filmmaking. Gilbert Gottfried is said to have given the best telling of The Aristocrats ever. Emphasis on “is said,” because we don’t actually get to see Gottfried tell the joke. Instead, we’re treated to fleeting glimpses of him telling the joke while intercut with other comics gushing over how great it was. Another misstep is the inclusion of Bob Saget. Follow me closely, because my complaint is a little odd. Saget’s claim to fame is bland, family friendly stuff like “Full House” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” To hear him tell a joke that’s nothing but obscenities should be a riot—and he tells it pretty well—but by putting him as just one of many perverts, he’s wasted.
(Let me make a quick tangent: if someone told you to put bits of rust in your car’s gas tank to prevent your car from rusting, you’d say he’s full of crap, right? I’ll need this later.
The documentary “The Aristocrats” is co-produced by Penn Jillette of the comedy-magic duo Penn & Teller. I watched an episode of their show “Bullshit!” right before seeing “The Aristocrats.” “Bullshit!” is best described as “Ripley’s Don’t Believe It.” The episode I saw—which debunked alternative medical practices like reflexology and magnetism—was essentially a 30 minute advertisement for the status quo using bad words and name-calling. Yes, the reflexologist was obviously a charlatan. But Penn Jillette mostly came across as a guy who, if he lived in the 15th century, would have cited “common sense” as his reason for rejecting immunization. That’s why I wanted to talk about putting rust in your gas tank. It sounds stupid and really counterintuitive—just like all the alternative medicines Penn and Teller felt deserving of bad words—but immunization is essentially the same principle: you voluntarily inject a small quantity of the disease into your blood.
The other thing that bugged me about “Bullshit!” was that Jillette put something of a logic mistake right out in the open. The doctors he picked to ridicule were obvious quacks. The doctors he picked to help him ridicule them were supremely straight, very normal, very professional. We believe them because they look and sound the way doctors ought. Yet, when Jillette pulled a stunt in which a phony doctor pandered the most absurd phony medicine in the middle of a shopping mall, he made it his business to have his phony doctor look very straight, very normal, very professional. Everyone who believed his lies did so because he looked and sounded the way doctors ought. Hmmm.)
It goes without saying that I’m not at all opposed to vulgarity. My favorite toilet joke ever is in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which I guess proves that I really can mention “2001” while reviewing any movie. As we’re traveling from the space wheel to the moon, listening to Strauss, watching the pretty stars, coldly observing the inhuman movements of the human crew, we suddenly cut to a close-up of a sign reading “Instructions for Using Zero Gravity Toilet.” Reading the sign with a look of intense concentration, while biting his thumb, is Heywood Floyd. Then we go back to outer space. This is, of course, so funny because it’s the only even remotely obscene thing to happen in the movie’s 2 ½ hour run-time. It is incongruous. Yet it also has the advantage of being inevitable, inescapable, and perfectly logical: eventually, you have to go to the bathroom in space.
Still, there was thunderous laughter and applause all around me in the theater playing “The Aristocrats.” For me, the documentary is an inside job: a movie made by comics, for comics. It’s not really that different from listening to auto mechanics or my helpdesk buddies talk shop. Stand-up comedy isn’t my shop; regular visitors to my site know I’m not funny.
Finished Saturday, August 27th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
Page two of “The Aristocrats.” Back to home.