PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 7/29/05)

Stop me if you've heard this one before: A man walks into a talent agent's office and says, "Have I got a family act for you!" He then proceeds to lay out the details of said act, which very swiftly becomes the filthiest and most eye-buggingly depraved idea of entertainment there ever was (GG Allin excluded). In only the best versions of this long-winded gag, the act involves incestuous orgies, copious quantities of fecal matter, bestiality and violent rape. Completely taken aback, the agent asks what they call themselves, to which the man offers a punchline: "The Aristocrats!" Truly lousy and notoriously shock-valuable to comedians as a sort of "secret handshake" amongst their kind, the joke is obviously not about its bait-and-switch dud of an ending; it's in the endless possibilities of its jazz-riff telling and how creatively crass the storyteller can be.

Utilizing consumer-grade DV cameras and pooh-poohing any sort of professional lighting, comedians Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette (of "and Teller" fame) asked over a hundred of their (mostly) top-shelf colleagues to informally deliver, analyze and explore the history of this crude show-biz yarn. Paul Reiser smugly tells the joke and not very well, but Robin Williams doesn't even tell it at all. Phyllis Diller claims to have fainted when she first heard it, Gilbert Gottfried is frighteningly the funniest of the lot, and Bob Saget's version is so unbelievably raunchy that he'll never be able to play another clean-cut sitcom dad (probably a good thing anyway). Also taking the spotlight are a mime, a juggling act, a card magician and South Park's Cartman, ha ha ha.

Barely a documentary and only made functional by some better-than-average editing (except for its slim 86-minute running time that still feels to be twice what's necessary), the results of this no-budget home movie are predictably redundant and not as consistently wet-your-pants hilarious as the project's been pitched. The real problem has nothing to do with whether it's too offensive or funny enough, but that its feature-length exhibition was obviously an afterthought. Too often meandering back to yet another surface-deep explanation of what, why and how the joke is, The Aristocrats lies halfway between two potentially great films: it's neither a smartly austere succession of jokesmiths with all the critique left to the audience, nor a deconstructionist essay on "crossing the line" and the language of comedy itself. At best, it's the kind of killer bootleg that would make the rounds in a college dorm on a worn-out videocassette.
—Aaron Hillis