Lindsay at Majikthise manages a twofer: saying something interesting and insightful about humor and jazz at the same time.
As you may have heard, The Aristocrats is a documentary featuring 100 retellings of the same joke.
Here are the bare bones: Family asks agent to consider their act, agent says he doesn’t do family acts but agrees to let them demonstrate, [act of unspeakable obscenity, incest is non-negotiable, may also feature scatology, beastiality, emetophilia, etc.], agent says “That’s a hell of an act, what do you call it? Family member answers “The Aristocrats.”
Honestly, the joke isn’t funny. In fact, that’s probably why it’s a perennial favorite with professional comedians. If you can make this joke funny, you could probably get laughs by reading a tax return.
The joke is like a lot of jazz standards. Tunes like Autumn Leaves aren’t that interesting until you’ve heard at least 20 different versions. Once you know that a work is a standard, you can step back from the material itself and concentrate on the artist’s interpretation. The movie features The Aristocrats as told by a mime, a magician, a tumbling act, the editorial staff of The Onion, the animated cast of South Park, and a huge variety of standup comics.
That’s a good way of understanding the enduring popularity of a joke that isn’t inherently very good. The jazz equivalent would be John Coltrane showing off with My Favorite Things — you can hear him thinking, “Hell, I can make even this shlock sound good.” Although I am also partial to Patricia Barber’s cover of Light My Fire.
August 5th, 2005 at 11:57 am
BBC America’s Talking Movies show reviewed the movie. They interviewed Penn (of Penn and Teller), wh is one of the people who made the movie. He actually gave the jazz analogy – that it is improvisation on a common theme that is where the art is – as part of why he wanted to do it.
August 5th, 2005 at 12:01 pm
The South Park segment (WMV) from the movie has made it to the internet.
Warning: Link is not work-safe! Really, really, not work-safe. The link isn’t even polite-company safe. Use headphones or something.
And, apparently, the South Park version is one of the milder versions from the movie.
August 5th, 2005 at 12:06 pm
Hey! Autumn Leaves is *not* uninteresting, and Favourite Things is *not* schlock! The chord structure of those pieces – and several other standards – is very rich. *That* is why they are Jazz standards, since they form a framework upon which you can build something interesting. The Jazz improvisation analogy for Aristocrats is good, I will admit (heard a lot of discussion on it on KPCC’s Airtalk film reviews last week), but I do not agree that a song need be a bad one to have lots of improvisations on it take it in new interesting directions. If that were the case, Bach (to pick but one example) would have been out of business, right?
Cheers,
-cvj
August 5th, 2005 at 12:12 pm
Thank you Aaron. And thanks for the warning – my earphones were definitely necessary.
August 5th, 2005 at 12:17 pm
Clifford, nobody says a song needs to be bad to have lots of improvisations etc. More like even songs that are not intrinsically challenging can be made more rich by a talented improvisor, and even more so by a set of challenging interpretations by different people.
August 5th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
I think we’re all in agreement Sean. You’ll hear no argument from me about the second sentence. -cvj
August 5th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
It’s high time that this joke is updated for an astrophysics audience. You know, instead of a family performing for a talent agent, change it to a job candidate giving a talk before a search committee. The only question is: what’s the best closing line? (Probably something related to the Big Bang.)
Of course, truth is stranger than fiction. It would be pretty hard to beat a certain cosmologist’s “performance” of the CDM rap during a job talk.
Zero
August 5th, 2005 at 6:23 pm
If you can find it, check out Negativland’s version of “My Favorite Things.” (Warning: It’s not jazz.)
August 5th, 2005 at 8:31 pm
“The joke is like a lot of jazz standards”.
I agree. It makes you groan. And wish you were somewhere else.
August 6th, 2005 at 8:55 pm
Is that “aristocrats” joke political? It sure sounds like something from the anti-aristocrat pornography of late 18th century France.