I went to see "The Aristocrats" tonight. I'd been really looking forward to it, expecting it to be an interesting exploration of the dark places that comedy can take you to. I wasn't entirely disappointed, but there was a level of disappointedness, largely because most of the versions of the joke in the film were somewhat similar and lacked much imagination and didn't have a particularly high level of offensiveness. Most versions of the joke were about shitting in buckets and having sex with kids and seemed very similar. I kind of thought the film would start this way and then move the joke onwards to dazzling levels of shocking material. Maybe my levels of what is shocking are harder to reach than for the average person or maybe its more incredible to do this sort of stuff in America (and it's a very American film, relying a small deal on recognising the people who are telling the joke), but I thought the array of brilliant comedians they were talking to would come up with more inventive stuff. George Carlin was great, partly because of the poetic detail he went into with his description of the defecation (too many versions were just too crude and pedestrian) and partly because he was clearly making this up off the top of his head and yet it was still both beautiful and ugly. I also enjoyed Doug Stanhope and another comedian telling the joke to their babies, mainly in truth because it was interesting to see how a baby responds to something like this that they can't understand. The South Park version started to go somewhat down the route I had expected as it included an impression of the victims of 9/11 and the writers from the Onion seemed to be trying to push back the boundaries by making the joke about what is offensive now.
I guess I had just expected the film to push back the boundaries further, yet it was still an interesting investigation into the way that comedy can help us deal with the unsavoury things that can happen in this world. It also includes what must be one of the world's worst ventriloquists - not that he isn't funny, he is reasonably - just that you could really see his mouth moving all the time.
I don't think my enjoyment was helped by the fact that there was a group of about 20 American teenagers in ten cinema who were very over-excited right from the start and chatting and laughing and showing off. Luckily they calmed down a little once the film had started and I didn't feel in a position to complain too much, because it reminded me of all the times that me and my teenage mates acted in the same way. I felt old and grumpy, but also there were too many of them for me to reasonably be able to deal with if things turned nasty. Given that there were more than none of them.
