Posted by Mr. Beaks

The great irony of what is surely the funniest joke you will ever hear is that it ends with a hopelessly inscrutable, resoundingly unfunny punch line:  “The Aristocrats”. 

What may have, at one time, been a savagely satiric indictment of the ruling class has since become a liberating excuse for comedians to work as blue as possible.  The set up of the joke has a family of entertainers walking into a talent agent’s office to sell their act – an act that encompasses, for starters, sex, incest, sodomy and beastiality (provided the teller is bold enough to work in the family dog).  The comic is encouraged to let his vulgar imagination run wild for as long as possible until they’ve exhausted their capacity to offend, at which point the talent agent asks the family what, in the name of the god that must be absent or indifferent to allow such vile inhumanity, they call the act.  “The Aristocrats.”  It’s a joke that only a comic’s comic could pull off, a notion reinforced by the realization that the only way Gallagher could conceivably e;xe;cute; it would be to drag his family onstage and rape them with the Sledge-O-Matic, which would get him arrested and, therefore, effectively end his career.  Dare to dream.  However, in lieu of Gallagher, director Paul Provenza and executive producer Penn Jillette, called on damn near every great stand-up comic working today to work their uniquely twisted variation on the joke.  It’s quite a roster:  George Carlin, Steven Wright, Richard Lewis, Dom Irrera, Trey Parker & Matt Stone, Eddie Izzard, Lewis Black, and the list goes on.  It’s hard to imagine there will be a funnier film released to theaters this year.

A week ago, I sat down for a very small roundtable interview with the gloriously indecent minds behind The Aristocrats, Provenza and Jillette, who discussed, among many other topics, the genesis of the project, the great comics they couldn’t get on camera, and, finally, the psychotic genius of the late Michael O’Donoghue. 

Where was Bill Cosby’s version of this joke?

Penn:  Bill Cosby we actually got fairly close to, and talked to a good friend of his – same with Woody Allen and a few others that are conspicuous in their absence.  But one of the basic ideas of this movie was not to seduce.  Studios are desperate; studios have to engage talent.  We were calling friends, so when I called somebody, and they said, “Let me think about it”, I never called them again.  If you call a friend to have coffee, and he says, “I don’t know if [I want to]”, you don’t call him again.  This is a friendship thing.  Studios are really desperate to do this.  Of course, everything is business.  It’s show business… but, most important, it was the two of us fucking around.  That was more important, so we didn’t push anybody.  Bill Cosby might’ve said “yes” if I called him a few more times, but we don’t know.  And this is really important:  we don’t know any of the reasons that anyone said, “No”, because we didn’t want to know them. When you ask someone out to dinner, and they say “No”, it’s very rude to push for a reason.  So, some of them, I think, were sincerely busy.  (Laughs.)  And some of them probably didn’t want to do it.  But we don’t know the difference, and they’re still friends of ours.  And I think that’s a terrific thing.

Did you ask Jerry Seinfeld to take part?

Paul:  I did ask Seinfeld, actually, and he laughed so hard when I told him what we were doing.  But it was right about the time when Comedian was released, and he said, “You know, it sounds like it might be overlapping.  I don’t feel right about doing something that sounds so similar to what I did.”  Of course, it ended up being not similar at all, except in the behind-the-scenes of comedy aspect to it, but he was really supportive.  In fact, he turned me on to some other people, and gave me [other comedians’ contact info].  I don’t know if he’s seen it yet – I don’t think he has – but that’s why he didn’t do it. 

Another thing that’s interesting is that it’s a bad idea on paper.  (Laughs.)  I mean, if somebody had come to me with this, I’d go, “Oh, I don’t know about that.”  It’s really astonishing the leap of faith people took in doing this, because it’s just a bad idea.  And they would say, “I don’t really get it.  How exactly are you going to put this together?”  And we’d go, “We have no idea.” 

Penn:  The heartbreakers on this, and there are some heartbreakers on this – Buddy Hackett.  I called Buddy Hackett.  I talked to him for about – and the temptation to exaggerate is tremendous – probably fifteen minutes.  He told me the joke; he told me two or three version of the jokes; he told me other jokes.  He got it, and understood it, and then said, “I’m just too fucking old.  I’m not doing anything else.”  I had the exact same story, the exact same day, with Rodney Dangerfield.  I hung up on Buddy Hackett, picked up Rodney Dangerfield, and he gave me the same thing.  Now, if I were the kind of Michael Moore scumbag who tapes his calls, I bet they would’ve given me permission to use that. 

The other one is Johnny Carson, who was a very big supporter of this movie.  I had a date to show him this movie after it was done and at Sundance.  And Johnny… this is his favorite joke, he loved the idea, he was behind it and wanted to see it.  But Johnny was retired, and respect dictates that you don’t go, “No, no, you like the idea!  Come on, Johnny!”  I mean, we wanted him so badly in this movie.  So, you know, Buddy Hackett, Rodney Dangerfield and Johnny Carson should have been in it, wanted to be in it, but it was made too late.  That’s the only problem.  But, you know, all things said, it would’ve changed the feeling of the movie to have that much sadness focused on it.  It’s bad enough that Jay Marshall, who had been a mentor of Teller’s and mine for thirty-five years, died three weeks ago.  The first person to tell the joke in the movie died a while ago.  And someone said, “Are you going to put a little dedication in?”  And I said, “What could be a bigger dedication than him being the first one in the movie to tell it?”

Paul:  Especially after how many years in show business?

Penn:  Seventy-six.  (Laughs.)  You know, there’s 140 hours that were cut out of this movie, and Jay Marshall… talks about how he was, like, eight in vaudeville, and he heard this joke.  We really have it traced back forever.

Paul:  He heard it from a guy who was an old guy at the time, who said that he heard it when he was a kid in vaudeville, which was back in the middle of the nineteenth century.  Of course, the other great thing is the fact that someone was telling [“The Aristocrats”] to an eight year old.  (Laughs.)

In terms of its provenance, is that the earliest you can go?

Paul:  That’s the earliest that we can, with any reasonable certainty, put it back.

Penn:  Jay is the earliest that we’ve gotten it.  You know, everybody will say that it’s been around forever, and the question is, “What’s the definition of ‘forever’ in comedy terms?”  Is that sixty years, or is that 600 years?  There’s no way of knowing.  The times they’ve tried to trace back jokes – Steve Allen did a rather famous book about that – it’s been a miserable failure. 

Because it’s an oral tradition.

Paul:  Exactly.  And that’s the other interesting thing about it.  This joke – and this movie, I guess, is part and parcel of it – really is sort of like the bastard stepchild of the great American oral storytelling tradition.  I mean, these jokes have been around forever, and a lot of old timers talk about how, “Oh, that joke that somebody did about Madonna, I heard it about The McGuire Sisters.”  Chaucer’s filled with filthy jokes, and Shakespeare’s full of dick jokes, and you can see the origins of some of the jokes that we’ve heard at parties over the last two weeks.  So, it’s also another interesting thing, to throw light on that.

Penn:  Not only an oral tradition, but also an oral tradition that’s not taken seriously.  It’s harder to do scholarship on the early days of Juggs Magazine than it is on National Geographic.  Even though they use some of the same pictures.  (Laughter.)

Are there any pre-Lenny Bruce comics – I’m thinking of guys like Jack Benny – that you would’ve loved to have heard their version of the joke?

Penn:  I went through about… fifteen hours of the raw Lenny Bruce stuff, and there was a bit that he did about a couple of cocksuckers going on stage.  That’s an interesting act.  There is that punch line, which is a version, in the very broad sense, of “The Aristocrats.”  We could’ve edited it and used some Lenny Bruce, and we felt, after listening to it and talking about it, that it would’ve been a little bit disingenuous, because we would’ve been giving the impression that Lenny Bruce was really telling this joke.  But, certainly, Lenny told it.  Certainly Richard Pryor told it.

Paul:  Paul Krasner, who wrote with Lenny Bruce and was a friend of his, he said that he heard Lenny tell it to musicians.  You know, musicians love this joke, too, as well as comedians.

Penn:  The person who may be the biggest fan of this joke is a guy named Mike Jones, who is the best bebop piano player in the world today, you know, since Oscar Peterson had a stroke.  He’s a phenomenal piano player, and just so deeply steeped in the bebop tradition.  And every time Jonesy sees this movie, and he’s seen it thirty times now – he’s a friend of mine – I just have this feeling that he understands it better than we do.  The movie is so rooted in bebop.  That’s where the movie started…, with me talking to Provenza about improvisation and bebop, and Coltrane and Miles Davis.  That’s where it starts. 

Paul:  In that light, I can tell you that one of my fantasies is to hear [the joke] done by Lord Buckley.  (Penn Gasps.)  That would be bebop.  It would be literally bebop.

Penn:  Well, Lord Buckley and Lenny Bruce were very influenced by bebop.  And, then, you’ve got George Carlin, who comes out of bebop, but then changes it to the rock-and-roll sensibility. 

Carlin’s version of the joke has got so much detail.  It sounds like it could’ve been epic, but he just stops, and I was just like, “He could’ve done that for another hour.”

Penn:  Everybody could’ve done that for another hour.  There’s a lot of time spent on how talented the people in this movie are; they certainly are among the most talented people in the world, and certainly in comedy in the United States.  But then you’ve got to go what Provenza did:  the raw footage is just beautiful, but the raw footage… you would need to be a special kind of person to understand how great it is.  The thing that Provenza did that really surprised me is that…  Provenza found a way through editing and through his sensibility to explain what he personally loves about comedy.  And you’ve got this movie that is my two favorite things in art:  it’s a collaboration and it’s absolutely a single man’s vision.  Those are the two things you want most.  I remember once when I was dating a geologist in the seventies.  Apocalypse Now came out, and this woman said to me, “I don’t want to see one man’s ego trip.”  And I said, “I don’t ever want to see anything else.”  So, the hard part of this movie is taking this huge collaboration of all these brilliant men and women, and then filtering it through one person’s sensibilities so you don’t get a committee.  Committees just make everything beige; that’s the only thing they’ll ever agree on.  And Provenz, man, I think when you see this movie, you come out knowing a lot more about comedy and a lot more about Paul Provenza.

Paul:  Because I also have fucked most of my family.  (Laughter.)

Did the film take many different forms in the editing room?

Paul:  First of all, it was over a year in editing.  (Paul’s trying to answer the question while fiddling with his cell phone, which issues what sounds vaguely like a Carmen ring tone.)  I’m trying to figure out how to turn this off.  (Penn reaches for the phone to do it for him.)  Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop!  It’s important.  It’s the clinic; they’ve got your results.  (Penn laughs, and, shortly thereafter,  the cell phone is silenced.)  So, I sat with this movie for months and months, and all I did was watch the footage over and over again.  I transcribed all of it myself, so I got to know it really intimately well, to the point where Emery (Emery), who I edited it with, said I was like Rain Man with the footage.  What happened was that ideas started to emerge, and I would get a sense of certain things that were being captured.  I had an idea of what those things were, so I just built these huge arcs that swam around those ideas.  In this particular case, it really didn’t take different shapes because the ideas were so clear, and they were a lot of the same ideas that Penn and I talked about on the first day we thought about this at The Peppermill in Las Vegas.  It took a lot of different twists and turns, but it was basically about those ideas every step of the way.  Having said that, if somebody really wanted to do it, you could go back in and make about 1,000 movies, all of which are cogent, all of which have ideas in them, and all of which are absolutely hilarious.  There are definitely an infinite variety of movies that can be made from it, but we wanted to make the one that was about the ideas that meant the most to us, which is about creativity, the individuality of art, freedom… all those things were the things we were interested in and love about comedy.

Penn:  There’s Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.  Charlie Chaplin did trial and error; he just kept doing stuff until it seemed to be okay to him.  Buster Keaton had an idea in his head, and just presented it.  And I pushed really hard in this movie for Provenza to do that.  You could take this footage, and keep putting it in front of focus groups, and get yourself a movie that would get this many laughs, but it wouldn’t be as satisfying.  And it was the satisfying part… you know, we knew we had funny from the moment we turned the camera on Bobby Slayton, who was the first, [but] it was making sure that it had a richness as well as that. 

Provenza just glazed over this like it was no real big deal, but I think you should really make note of it:  he transcribed 140 hours himself, typed it out.  And then, although I didn’t understand it at the time, he sat for a few months like fucking Mozart and made the movie in his head, and found a way to tell that story.  There was a lot of playing around, but this is not a trial and error movie.  We live in a time when people say, “This is what plays:  get Tom Cruise, get big monsters, do this, do that… and you’ll be able to get stuff that’s okay.”  And you do get stuff that’s okay, but you’re never going to get better until you open up your heart.  You can’t do it with your head.

Paul:  Just to add to that, since Penn’s sucking my cock right now (Penn laughs), I feel like I owe him a blow job in return.  One of the really profound things that Penn did in that process was to really encourage me to take chances, and to encourage me to listen to an inner voice, and to not listen to other people’s opinions.  So, all the choices that were made in terms of material, and there is some material that’s in the film where those particular individuals did stuff that may have been funnier, but [the material we included] speaks more to an idea or something like that.   Penn was really adamant about making sure that my voice was clear, and I can’t imagine any other time in show business where the guy who financed the movie is telling the guy who’s putting it together, “Please make it more specific to what you like, and less what other people like.”  (Laughs.)  That’s a pretty astonishing thing to happen, and I’m spoiled for life now.

It sounds like you guys have mountains of material.  Does that mean we’re going to get a huge DVD out of this?

Paul:  If enough people buy tickets, yeah.  If enough people go to see the movie, we hope to do a project that’s rather elaborate.  But it’s a big job.

Penn:  But remember... we don’t want to.  I really was not lying when I said that the raw footage was good, but more of what you like about this movie is Paul Provenza than you might think at first blush.  We’ve talked about something down the line – I mean, five, six or seven years – of having The Aristocrats Project, which is Provenza doing in DVD format, which is maybe five or six hourse, what he did in the movie format, which is ninety minutes.  That would be wonderful to see something like that down the line.  In the meantime, I think the DVD will have some extra footage.  The footage that’s there, what Carlin called a snapshot of comedy at the turn of the century… it’s still great, but you’re going to like it much more if Provenza holds you by the hand while you’re watching it.

Is there anything that was too outrageous that you had to censor?

Paul:  We have “nigger cunts”!  What more do you want!?!?  (Wild laughter from everyone in the room.)  Boy, you people are never satisfied!

I was thinking that if you could every single comic telling this joke it would be the filthiest version of the Shoah Foundation…

Penn:  “Sho-ho-hoah!”

Paul:  That’s what I said we’d call the nine hour cut:  Sho-Ho-Hoah.  (Laughter.)

Billy the Mime, was it?

Paul:  Billy the Mime.  Get that name right!

I just made a mental note, because we’ve had discussion after discussion [in the movie], and all of a sudden he’s just acting it out there on the boardwalk with bright sunlight, and I was horrified.  I want you to know, and this is true, I went home and threw up.  [Note: Beaks did not ask this question.  For the record, he went home and changed his badly soiled boxer shorts.]

Penn:  (Cackling)  That’s a pull quote!

That’s my review:  “I laughed so hard, I vomited”.  But I wanted to ask:  1) where did you find him, and 2) how did you actually know where to put that?

Paul:  First of all, Billy the Mime is one of the greatest mime artists of our generation.  He’s brilliant.

Penn:  If there’s one definition of “damming with faint praise”, he just gave it to you.

Paul:  Billy is a mime artist who pushes the boundaries of the art of mime.  Billy’s best known pieces are “Dreams of a Young Crippled Boy”, “The Short Tragic Life of John Kennedy, Jr.”

Penn:  He’s actually doing a one-man show in Vegas.  Sacred Fools.  And Billy the Mime has many incarnations of things he’s done in other fields, and so on, but he’s chosen to be called “Billy the Mime”.

Paul:  There’s a new piece he’s got called “A Day Called 9/11”.  And as far as the placement, it was right in front of my house.  I got up late that day.

Has anyone ever related to you what Michael O’Donoghue’s version of “The Aristocrats” is like?

Penn:  Chevy Chase talked to me a little bit about it on the phone.  T-Shaun [Shannon] talks about it, right?

Paul:  Martin Mull told great Michael O’Donoghue stories about how [Michael] had a pet collie that died, so he had the collie skinned and made a rug out of his old collie.  (Shocked laughter.)  And once in a while on a Sunday, he would say, “I’ll meet you for coffee somewhere”, and he would meet Martin Mull dragging on a leash this [collie rug].

Penn:  (Laughing hysterically) Did you ever meet Michael?

Paul:  I do not believe I met Michael.  I may have met him a million years ago – I believe it was him, in retrospect, with [Al] Franken and [Tom] Davis. 

Penn:  I went out to dinner with him a couple of times, and Michael O’Donoghue… you know, the problem is you want to use superlatives all the time.  You want to use superlatives for Gilbert and for Carlin and for Michael O’Donoghue.  But I remember we sat down to dinner, and he said, “Penn, surely God could’ve thought of a better gift to give us than life”.  (Huge laugh.)

Paul:  He also said one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard said about comedy.  He said, “Laughter is a response to comedy; it is not the only response.”  I love that.  I think that says everything you need to know.  I don’t know when comedy ended up being an art form whose edges are defined by the audience reaction.  I don’t understand that.  And Michael O’Donoghue with that quote just says, “You know what?  It doesn’t matter.” 

Penn:  Michael O’Donoghue, also, his biggest insult he could give to anybody was, “Oh, he can take it, but he can’t dish it out.”  (Everyone laughs.)

Who was that about, do you know?

Penn:  Anybody that he hated, which I think was…

Paul:  Everybody.  (Laughs.)  He had been on my radar when I was starting out… because of National Lampoon and things like that.  But the thing that really put it over the top for me was when I found out he wrote the line on Saturday Night Live during the Karen Ann Quinlan story.  It was a birthday party for Karen Ann Quinlan, and her boyfriend came and brought moss for her north side.

Penn:  (Laughing his ass off)  When I was eighteen, I hitchhiked to New York City, and I wanted to see Lemmings.  I didn’t know anything; I had never been out of a small town.  And I called The National Lampoon, through directory assistance, to ask them about how you get tickets to see Lemmings.  And the phone was answered by O’Donoghue.

Paul:  No!

Penn:  And I started crying.  I couldn’t believe that someone whose name I had seen [in print] was actually on the phone with me.  Now, I was from a small town; I had never been to a live show of any kind, you know?  And he’s from the city; I’m not.  It was amazing.  I remember going, “Um, I… I… I… want to see… National Lampoon’s Lemmings.”  And he went, “What the fuck are you calling here for, it’s a magazine!?!?”