The joke leads me down one path and then it switches the path on me suddenly,
and it hits me with a hammer.
It's just, "Here we go, folks."
You have outstretched yourself when you're doing it right, on making it as horrific as you can.
- And bam! - Fan them with as polite a title as you can.
- The Aristocrats. - The Aristocrats.
- What?
I've heard the joke. But I don't remember what was so bad.
I remember that I... fainted.
That joke's been around. The Aristocrats is a classic.
They told it on the Niña or the Pinta or Santa Maria when Columbus was crossing the ocean.
I think Lincoln told me, I'm not quite sure.
I was at the theatre at the time, I was an usher.
Of all the jokes to do a documentary about, you chose this one?
There was the Secret Society - Chevy Chase, Michael O'Donoghue.
John Belushi and some others.
They had this coven of people who would tell this joke over and over again.
Chevy Chase supposedly used to have parties. And the criteria was,
you had the mom, the dad, the son, the daughter, and a dog.
And you had to talk with some combination of that without repeating yourself.
If you repeated yourself, you were out.
The idea was we gotta break a half an hour.
We gotta get - we gotta make this joke last more than half an hour.
I don't know whether they ever did. O'Donoghue came close.
But died in the attempt.
Not well known.
I heard Michael O'Donoghue did it for 90 minutes once.
It's the only joke I know that people talk about.
I'm always shocked when people don't know this joke. It's pervasive.
It's a burlesque kind of a joke.
It had been kicked around a lot.
I remember it - the same you remember any first.
Like the first time you hear a cut from a Lenny Bruce album.
Shocking! You'd never heard that.
I heard it from a gentleman who ran Second City in Chicago.
...UCLA, working on the humour magazine, the editor told me the joke.
- Bill Hicks - that's where I heard it. - I first heard the Aristocrats while doing blow
in Catch A Rising Star with Richard Belzer.
This joke is a friend of every comedian in the world.
I first went to the lmprov nightclub in New York in '73.
Did some stand-up comedy, became the manager,
and got to meet the best young comedians of that time.
Got a real education in the comedy world.
One of the things that was consistent wherever you went was the...
Aristocrats joke.
I had heard about the Aristocrats joke.
We do comedy and we work places that have comedy,
but we're also in the magic world, so we're kind of observers of the comedy world.
There was always a secret handshake of... of a whole culture thing,
that was, to me, symbolised by the joke, the Aristocrats.
I don't think comics should be that proud, quite frankly,
about repeating a joke that's been going on since
Bud Friedman opened the first Improv next to the pyramids.
You dig?
Comedians didn't tell this kind of joke on stage.
How many people tell jokes on stage?
People usually have routines or they string together small observations.
You don't do joke-jokes on stage ever. That's a kiss of death. You're viewed as a hack.
You know the way those urban legends go?
People always knew somebody who saw this guy doing it.
But I never saw anyone performing it.
It's a kind of joke you love telling other comics.
We told them to each other. Not to do with our act.
It was the kind of thing that you would share with the musicians.
It just remained in the business, swirling round.
- Funnier stuff happened after the audience left. - We're different. We're in here. There's no rules.
Headmaster's home, we had the dormitory to ourselves. "Wait till you hear this."
I have a recollection of the joke being told at about five o'clock in the morning
for a bunch of comedians.
You always saved it - like a powerhouse.
It was one of those toppers you could pull out.
There was almost like a chorus of the punch line. "And what's it called?"
But the jokes that we loved telling, and the jokes I always loved,
were jokes that have this body of performance in the middle.
It's a show-offy, kind of an inside thing for performing comics.
Garry Shandling told it to me as the way I told it, word for word,
at the Emo, which is like playing the telephone game.
There's the basic framework, but then every comedian puts his own imprimatur on the joke.
And really makes it their own.
I don't know the standard telling of this joke any more, it's lost.
Well, it's a vaudeville agent.
Jay Marshall is the definitive joke-teller on that,
even though he's not known as a comedian,
because he is from the variety arts.
Jay Marshall turns out to be the one who tells the Aristocrats joke for the Legman book.
It's the last story in the book.
He gets the whole thing across in a few sentences.
A vaudeville agent is interviewing acts, and an act comes in.
He says, "What do you do?"
"Well, my wife and I come out and take our clothes off and we shit on the stage
and the kids come out and wallow in it."
He says, "What kind of an act do you call that?"
He says, "We call it the Aristocrats."
The joke sucks. You suck for having the idea of putting this on a documentary.
I hate the joke.
A piece of shit stolen... pretend to be humour.
Although the premise is funny. Let me just...
Let me backtrack just a bit.
Well, it's a perfectly crafted joke.
A two-word punch line.
And since the middle is open you can do anything with it.
It's like a jazz theme. There's the basic melody but anybody can improvise on it.
And I cannot remember for the life of me, what the details of the act were.
I just knew as I was hearing it you could do what you want with it.
As long as you got to the, "What do you call the act?" "The Aristocrats."
You just wanna shock the people
so when you come back, the juxtaposition of their name becomes the laugh.
It's filled with vulgarity.
Not kind of vulgar, it's... it's revolting.
It's disgusting, and then the punch line.
And then the punch line is sort of uplifting.
The more vulgar it is, the more ironic becomes the punch line.
The more grotesqueries, the better of it.
That's the craft, the art is how you make that turn.
That's the thing you can't bottle. That's a performance thing.
Guy goes into the agent's office and he says,
"I've got an act for you. Wait till you hear this." "Tell me a little about it. What's the act?"
He says, "My wife and I come out on stage.
I've taken a lot of medicine,
prior to the appearance.
And I've eaten a lot of cabbages and things.
She lies down on the stage,
I squat over her, I pull down my pants.
And I shit in her mouth, it's mostly liquid. It's like a diarrhoeic thing.
I try to include corn and things that will not break down in the digestive system.
Peanuts, of course.
I try to get a lot of solid objects so that's there's a little action too.
It's not just a stream of brown liquid.
And it all goes into... I can hit her mouth pretty well.
I do have one polyp - I have a large, kind of a haemorrhoidal polyp
that sometimes throws my aim off and I have to...
It's kind of like Kentucky windage, but I usually get it.
I can hear whether it's hitting the hollow area of her throat.
So I get as much as I can in there and then she gargles with it.
You hear the gargling. She gargles and gargles.
And then she swallows it. And...
we're off- it's about five minutes total."
The guy says, "Oh. What do you call the act?"
"The Aristocrats."
- I was making that up - I guess you could tell.
The fun of it is where you improvise on the grossness,
doing the John Coltrane version of it.
This joke was a joy for comics to tell mainly because it was such a foul chunk of time
that you could just be describing the most foul things.
There's nothing you could come up with that would be wrong.
A blank slate, and you get to play.
You get to play.
How many new things could you think of to make this group of people bizarre?
Whether it's a shuffleboard up a nice animal's behind,
or whether people are swimming in manure.
A young girl comes on stage singing Nearer My God To Thee
while juggling torches.
These are my two children - they pass gas to the tune of What A Wonderful World, in unison.
One of the sons is playing a xylophone with his cock.
A midget uncle with three dicks coming out of his head.
I come out, dressed as Hitler, in crotchless panties.
I am catching the ping pong balls and I am catching them in my ass.
He comes on my wife's tits. We wait till it hardens and I chip it off with a chisel.
- Six midgets come out... - They have sex in a kiddie pool,
full of beef entrails and aborted foetuses.
Little midgets, they all start coming, one by one.
And shoot thousands of jism into hundred-dollar seats.
You know how the fountains at the Bellagio are coordinated?
That was what these guys pulled off.
My grandmother, on the stage, has an abortion.
Gives birth to a three-pound Shetland pony.
The kids are Siamese twins, attached at the ass.
My grandfather is the jockey. Comes in third and paid 280.
The Siamese twins give each other reach-arounds and jerk each other off.
I don't know whether the object is to be as offensive as possible
or whether use it judiciously in the right places as a build-up to the punch line.
I like to explain how to tell the joke - you already heard the joke.
So when you wanna tell the joke you have to make sure it's really filthy.
Guy goes into a talent agent's and says, "I've have the greatest act."
"What's the act?" That's all you gotta memorise.
You can ad-lib, right up to the punch line. All you gotta do is remember one word.
I always make it up, every time I tell it, something different.
They would be naked, something to do with peeing.
We're high-flying trapeze performers, we fly over the audience doing triple gainers.
We piss over the first three rows.
Include faeces.
Takes a crap on stage, jumps in the pile of shit.
They take a big group shit.
The women slide on their asses all the way up through this shit.
We just roll around in the shit.
And they start skating in the shit. You know, people skate in shit.
Dabbles in the shit. Do a little dance. Dabbles in piss, do a little dance.
Waddling in the shit and piss and they're wiping it in each other's faces.
- One of them takes a shit. - And everybody slides through it.
They end up in the splits in the shit. They go into the splits and have a big finish.
That's the finish? I thought they peed on each other.
Include vomit.
Gets sick, vomits. Eats the vomit.
Everybody starts puking.
One of them vomited, and it made everybody else sick.
Wait. Wait. That made everybody sick?
Hey, shit and pee? No problem. You add vomit - forget it.
Scatological... it's edge humour, pushing the edge of what you can take.
And once the edge is crossed, you get hysterical.
Me and my wife come up on stage. She takes a dump in this big metal bucket.
She's got a bucket of shit, pours on it the guy's head.
My son, he's three years old.
This is the part that's adorable. Takes a bucket of shit, throws it in her face.
She takes the bucket of puke, shit and piss,
puts it over her head and starts parading on stage like a little midget Nazi.
Such disgusting references, one after another.
It kind of makes its own gravy, this joke.
It's a disgusting joke.
It's shit. But the only reason I could say that is because I'm really kind of an aristocrat.
Do they actually eat shit at any point during the act?
Absolutely.
Shitting, and eating it.
She reaches into grandpa's diapers, pulls out a bowl of shit and eats it like an apple.
I've heard bringing animals and bestiality into it.
I forgot the dog. There's a dog too.
And the dog! Uh-oh!
Then the dog fucks the girl.
That's called bestiality. It's in the Bible.
It's in my diary.
He says it's in his diary.
And I knew his dog.
I've heard er...
- Maybe we could do a version. - (Laughs) All right.
Unbelievable - along with the dog, the entire family is involved.
It's a family act which adds such a fucked-up dimension to it, anyway.
Include children in the act.
Unspeakable acts that the children are performing with and on each other.
People can get up on stage if they wanna finger my niece,
or touch my nephew's penis.
There should be high-risk behaviour, mixing of body fluids,
blood from every hole.
A lot of you are probably saying, "Wait. Backtrack a little here.
Where did the blood come from? You didn't say anything about blood."
Well, if a guy is fist-fucking his daughter, who's young and her asshole is pretty small,
and this is a grown man, with a big hand.
He could be, like, a longshoreman.
He could have arms like Popeye.
Where it's like, the arm is like that wide and her asshole is that small.
Think about that for a second. I'll wait.
Well, naturally she's gonna be bleeding. I'm just making a point.
The people are abusing each other. There's incest.
And all the things that cross lines.
So you get to play with people's little danger zones.
I fucked my wife, I fucked my sister, my son.
Everybody's fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
It's like a Tourette's syndrome joke.
I'm horrified and yet drawn to it, it's like...
a dog with three legs - you don't wanna look but you just...
It's a perfect joke.
Just hearing out loud, descriptions of "giddy shit-covered incest".
And other poems by Maya Angelou.
It is the one joke where you get to invent every sick act you could imagine,
load it up into this joke and never actually be accused of gilding the lily.
So the way I heard it was, it was always a very sweet beginning.
That was what killed me. The sweetness of the guy who walks in,
knocks on this very talented talent agency, he says,
"We have an act. Can I have a moment of your time?"
"You have one minute. Tell me about your act."
He says, "Well, it's a very different act. It's a bit of a novelty.
Myself, my wife and kids. First I come out. I'm in a tuxedo, my wife is in a gown.
The music starts, we do a dance.
My wife lifts her skirt, I start fucking her.
She's sucking me. My son comes in, drops his draws.
Now he's fucking my wife. I have a daughter, 15, she comes in.
My wife is going down on my son, my son has his arm up my daughter.
It's a beautiful thing, music comes to a finish.
We're all fucking, and everybody is just...
My daughter is on her back, she grabbing my son and myself in both hands.
My wife is singing.
And then we all drop our draws and take a huge shit on the stage."
Guy says, "That's a hell of an act. What do you call yourselves?"
He says, "The Aristocrats."
So there is the joke, that you get to actually say somebody had their arm up their daughter.
Which you don't really hear often.
Some people, when they tell it, really focus on the faecal matter.
Other people really focus on the incest.
And to me, in my own personal life, those two are rarely, if ever, separate.
So shock is one only thing that happens.
It comes with it. The other thing is the art of the joke.
You have to see pee first, instead of shit first.
Then you go to fuck, or then you go to fuck and then pee and go to shit.
I prefer the pee first.
To me, you've gotta save the scatological for the end.
If you put it in the middle, you have nothing left to close. Fuck, fuck, suck.
And then on top of that, took a big shit.
You need that separation, I feel. Otherwise, it's chaos.
I've got it as incest next to shit-eating.
- Dog-fucking. - Dog-fucking. I'm all about dog-fucking.
Shit-eating, dog-fucking, incestuous.
Me and my wife go on stage. We get undressed and I start nailing her.
As I'm fucking my wife she takes a dump in this bucket.
My son comes out, he pours kerosene in the bucket, lights it on fire.
Our trained dog Fifi comes out, jumps through a ring of fire. My son fucks the dog.
My daughter comes out, the dog fucks her.
We all say, "Good night, you've been great." Standing ovation every time.
It starts with a little dick-sucking.
The gals drop to their knees, start sucking off the boys.
And let me tell you, when my seven-year-old daughter
is giving a blow job to my eleven-year-old son, it's priceless.
And then we move on to the fucking.
But... we move over one.
Now I'm fucking my daughter, my son is fucking his grandmother
and my father is fucking my wife.
And then the denouement - the butt-fucking.
We move over one more time.
So I'm fucking my mother in the ass. My son is fucking his mother in the ass.
My father is fucking his granddaughter in the ass.
The men pull out, jerk off into a dish,
and the women slurp it down.
It's a real crowd-pleaser. Family act.
I go on stage, start to jerk off in a shot glass.
My wife comes out, takes a belt of my splooge, takes off her skirt, shits in a bucket.
My son pulls the shit out of the bucket, starts juggling it while he's pissing
into the mouth of his older sister, who is being butt-fucked by the dog.
Grandpa drops his pants, starts fucking the dog in the ass.
And the show ends with a big circle-jerk around Grandma.
Here's the kicker. Grandma is dead.
I mean, it has be really filthy dirty - the act.
It should start off, let's say it just starts off titillating.
And then it turns pornographic.
Then it starts to be the kind of thing where if your daughter was involved
you'd have to go and help her, you know, at any cost.
The police might not even step in.
And then the talent agent says, "That's awful. What do you call the act?"
Like he wants to know, like the name's the important thing.
I don't understand why he would say that. It doesn't matter what it's called.
Because no-one is gonna book this show.
Where did these people find employment?
How did they develop this act?
What made them think this was entertaining?
I mean it's surprising they haven't... that they're not all in jail.
I mean... and waiting...
waiting for the death penalty.
You can put people to death for what goes on in the best versions of this joke.
Cos you're probably saying, if you have any sense of human decency,
"Well, why didn't he stop them the minute he saw the father unzipping his pants?"
And saying, "This is totally wrong. Call the cops. Something horrible's happening.
This is a family who are raping their own children.
And performing bestiality.
Why, oh, why, is he allowing this to happen?"
But that's a whole other story.
But, anyway, he says, "What is it called?" Because in a joke that's what happens.
There's no legal system at all in play in a joke.
And then the guy goes, "The Aristocrats."
And I always throw in that.
That seems to make the whole joke. "The Aristocrats."
- "The Aristocrats." - Oh, yeah.
- "The Aristocrats."
I think it's all in the snap.
Here's for Drew.
- How many people do that when they tell it? - One.
- I'm the only one? - Yeah.
Really? Oh, man. I always, like... I always tell it like that.
Do they do that or?
- "The Aristocrats." - "The Aristocrats."
"The Aristocrats."
- "The Aristo..."
I never make it to the end. I crumble.
I say, "It's the loveliest joke."
Whoever told it to me, they finish and are covered in sweat,
and they're covered in come, and they're covered in shit. And...
"What do you call yourselves?" "The Aristocrats."
Ah, it's so great.
- I told you, I at least went like this.
"Aristocrats."
Oh, no, I like...
That's really all there is to it. You have to have blood, shit, piss,
and then erm... this!
So this cocksucker... What was it?
This cocksucker fucks his shit everywhere.
The cocksucker goes into a fucking...
and something faecal... Faecal or foetal?
And faecal is...
And the agent is fucking a dog, the Pope in the corner.
The trouble is, I've never heard this joke.
The whole shit thing, I think it's just...
The punch line doesn't work. The guy says, "I've got this act, a family act."
The guy says, "I've got shit everywhere. I don't want a family act."
No doubt that could work. He says, "What do you want?"
He goes, "Am I bothering you?"
You do it good. Have you done it? Give it to me. I'll film you now.
It takes a lot more skill than it looks like to tell it well.
All right. Here it is.
Three people walk into a theatrical agent's office.
And they say, "We have an act to show you and we're called the Aristocrats."
Fuck!
A guy goes into a talent agent's office. People make it elaborate. Doesn't matter.
It's a steamy, little, horrible, horrible office.
There's barely room... It's so funny whenever...
Ever been to Joe Franklin's office?
I've been in this office since 2000 BC.
I was in a different office until they condemned the building.
Frank Sinatra sat here, Bette Midler. Billy Crystal, Michael Jackson.
Julia Roberts was my secretary.
Produced the world's longest-running TV show here.
I'm Joe Franklin.
It's that office.
Man walks into an agent's office, and it's just like a desk and a couple of chairs, a telephone.
Stop dancing around, motherfucker, and tell the fucking thing.
Phone, you know, square room like a box.
All right, already!
You are fuckin' horrible. Tell the joke!
- Tell the thing! - All right.
My wife comes out in a beautiful evening gown and plays Tea For Two on a xylophone...
- With her cunt? - No, no, no.
Then my grandparents come out and they sing God Bless America.
- It's real patriotic. - While fucking each other?
Yuck! Ever see an old woman's cunt? It looks like Silly Putty.
So then they... You killed me. You're killing me here.
You're a loser. You can't tell a fuckin' joke.
My son comes out, I shoot him in the head and I fuck the bullet hole.
Then my daughter comes on stage. She's a real sexy nine-year-old.
I hit her on the head with an axe handle,
burn her cunt with a curling iron
put a fish hook through my cock, fuck her, kill her
and take a shit on her dead body.
That's the kind of delivery you need.
Cocksucker.
I actually stretched it out once to two and a half hours.
- But I blew the punch line.
I got all the way to the end. It involved white slavery and a zeppelin race.
And then at the end, I go, "The Aristocats."
Crats! Argh!
It's the Aristocrats, not to be confused with the wonderful Disney film The Aristocats.
Often, I'd go, "Be-pa-bada, he's sucking and she's..."
"What do you call yourself?" "The Aristocats. Oh, no - the Aristocrats!"
So people would think that was part of the joke, that the guy himself got the name wrong,
and people would be saying, "Why did he say cats and then crats?"
He didn't. I just had a problem. Which was more absurd.
They go, "Your joke takes 11 minutes to tell, and you don't understand the punch line."
So it was a bit of a dangerous joke for me.
But I tell it to you to help others,
so the kids who follow me won't live the horror and the shame that I did.
I hate jokes. I can't remember them.
The only joke I could ever tell is about a man who goes into a pub in Glasgow.
He sees another guy and the other guy hits him over the head with an iron bar.
And he says, "Hey! Ow! Are you trying to be funny?"
And the guy says, "No..." I'm sorry. Can we do that again?
I'm no fucking good at jokes.
I don't do jokes and I didn't even want to do this - but when they beg, it's ridiculous.
With my kind of thing, it's always attitude.
I've never been one to pick up on jokes. Not that there's anything wrong in it.
When I told it to Emo, he looked like, "God, that's the joke I should have written but I never will."
That is an Emo joke.
These three guys walk in. They said, "We have a great, great act."
They unzip their flies and pee on the floor.
Then they pull down their pants and poo on the floor.
Then they put their fingers down their throats and vomit.
Then they start slip-sliding.
The agent said, "What do you call yourselves?" And they said, "The Aristocrats."
Then there are people who just really love the writing of the joke and the mood of the joke.
And the agent says, "I love it, but I'm not gonna book you until I see you live.
This weekend I'll see the Butt-Fucking Fauntleroys and the Shit-Eating Grannies.
Presuming I like you as much as I think I will, let me ask you this.
Are you married to the name the Aristocrats?"
There's a more writerly version of the joke.
A manager is trying to sell performers to a club owner.
The club owner goes, "OK, yeah, what's your act do?"
"A girl comes out and sucks off a donkey,
and a guy comes out, pisses on the girl, he pisses on the donkey..."
He says, "Listen, we have a classy joint here. I'm not sure it's our kind of act."
"You'll enjoy the Aristocrats."
The manager had to come up quickly with a name to sell the group, so there's motivation.
And it's a feelgood ending. Gets you here and gets you here. You know?
I like to think the manager's lying, that they don't do all that stuff.
They sing and they're funny but he now has to go back and say, "I've sold you.
This is the sort of thing you're gonna have to do.
You're gonna have to shag a donkey and shit..."
"What?!"
The guy with the saxophone, "Fuckin' what? What was that donkey shit?"
And, of course, everybody's style in telling the joke.
So the William Morris office wants to work with this act - it's a family act.
The Smothers Brothers is a family act. What do they do?
- They do some juggling. - It's a jug...
- It's a juggling act? - Juggling thing.
The father drops one of the clubs and asks his son to pick it up,
so his dad...
dad just knees him right in the balls.
- You're putting me on. - No, no.
Then the mother does a topless thing and goes down on the father.
- No! - The kids come out naked.
- Naked children? - Then they do a sex act...
- And then they throw up. - They throw up?
- Where have they worked? - All the best places.
- All the best places? - Do you wanna know...
- Do you wanna know what they're... - Not necessarily.
Well, ask me! It's kind of important.
OK. What is their name?
The Aristocrats.
- The what? Aristocrats? - The Aristocrats.
- You didn't think that's funny? - No.
It's a classic.
What makes that a classic?
A classic withstands the test of time and the Aristocrats is one of those classic jokes
that has gone through 50, 60, 70 years...
So, no matter how many times I hear it, I'll still think it's funny?
Whenever you say "Aristocrats" the audience falls down.
- I didn't. - Well, you're a straight man.
You're not supposed to.
The Aristocrats is so much about the kind of signature that a comedian puts on it.
That's what we do. You make it your own.
In the Amish version - the father flicks on a light, the mother's using a radio remote,
watching television. He goes, "What do you call yourselves?"
"Tis well we call ourselves the Aristocrats."
- That's the last thing...
First I come out on stage - and I am pregnant -
a friend of mine comes out and he starts fucking me up the ass.
The baby starts sucking the penis of the guy who's fucking me up the ass.
I start getting contractions and giving birth.
The baby starts coming out and come starts coming out of the baby's mouth.
I mean, come on, what is more beautiful than birth?
This woman comes into his office and wants representation.
She says, "I'm the centrepiece.
My husband comes out, he bends down, he goes down on me.
We used to have Grandma blowing Grandpa
while she had a kazoo out of her ass playing Begin The Beguine."
But she claims that these days she doesn't have the wind for it any more.
Personally, I think she's tired of blowing the guy after 54 years.
Comedians have done it in the way they tell it, but as you're listening
your own personal orientations you bring to this joke,
so it's funny for different reasons.
Sure I coulda told it some other way.
Some scatological bullshit that these boys love.
No, I needed the woman's point of view.
And you notice, the first sex act was the husband going down on the woman.
The man would have had a blowjob in there.
Grandma, by the way, is a talent, a gift beyond.
If she was born in another era, she could have been...
Liza Minnelli. That talented.
But because she was in the wrong time and place,
she ended up playing Begin The Beguine out of her asshole.
There are different rules for women.
Men, they can get... Men are expected to talk dirty.
And women are supposed to be ladylike.
They won't take it from Phyllis because that's not Phyllis's demeanour.
They'll definitely take it from me because if I don't say "cock" they're pissed.
Males have a cruder sense of humour.
A female wouldn't ever really create that joke.
I'm sick of women going, "It's a guy thing." It's a joke.
If funny is a guy thing, you know what? I'll strap it on.
Cos I go and I do stuff and people say, "What, you didn't curse?"
I'm trying not to do that, you know. I'm trying to be genteel and shit.
But it doesn't work for me.
So when I would tell a joke like this,
it would be all about dripping penises and...
maybe pulling foreskins back and making helmets out of 'em.
It would be the whole thing.
Why don't you do your version?
Because you've already got versions like that.
- I don't think we have. - Oh, I bet you do.
I bet you do. I know you do.
Four guys walk in. They say, "Let's see the act."
The four guys take their pants down,
they take their giant penises and they take the foreskin and go like this.
They pull up the penises like this and they go, "Wow."
They pull it down over themselves and start to sing...
# Hallelujah, hallelujah
# I give the world to...
That's the kind of joke I would fuckin' tell.
How could you clean that joke up? I guess you could say "making love".
But they're brothers and sisters so it's already incest.
You're already in a big hole.
Well, actually, when the curtain rises,
there we are on stage - me, my two daughters, my wife,
and a gorilla named Daisy from the Belgian Congo.
My daughter pulls my index finger, at which point I let out a thunderous fart.
My wife does a very sexy striptease dance on a tom-tom.
Following that, I have a violent love affair with the gorilla Daisy, if you know what I mean.
But have no fear, if there are any children, they'll be brought up as Catholics, you see.
He was in purple, she was in heliotrope.
They would come in... They had two black satchels.
They said, "We work in one. It's an olio."
And the band will go...
And he opens up the black case and there's a silver hammer in it.
His wife pulls out the chair and he sits down upon the chair.
His wife takes the hammer and with a great, swift movement -
bang! - hits her husband right in the forehead.
He goes ass over tea kettle back down,
over the couch, over the agents, back in and pulls the drapes down.
The agent says, "My God, I've never seen anything like that in my life!"
"Thank you very much." He picks up the hammer, puts it away,
then he picks up that case, picks up the other one.
They're about to leave and he says,
"Excuse me, just for curiosity,
what's in the other case?"
And he says, "Tylenol."
"And what's the name of your act?"
"We call ourselves... The Sophisticates."
That's how I heard it.
They are my generation of entertainer. We were all together at the same time.
You had to work clean because there were signs backstage,
"No dirty material. Nothing blue."
You got vaudeville and the chitlin' circuit.
A black comic can always be dirty.
Couldn't get on TV so he weren't worried about who we offended.
They'd be dirty on stage. It didn't matter.
So, a joke where part of the fun is that you're dirty, and they could tell it anytime they want.
Cocks and cunts. That's where it's at.
Seinfeld never cursed. I told you that.
- Be like Seinfeld. - All right.
Did you ever notice when you kick your girlfriend in the cunt she calls the cops on you?
In all of art it's the singer, not the song.
You see that when you hear jazz musicians who play the same song over and over again.
You hear one note of Coltrane, you know it's Coltrane.
But I never understood it as so clear in comedy.
When someone tells the Aristocrats very clearly, it's the singer, not the song.
Here's the joke. A guy goes into a talent agent's.
He says, "I just saw the most amazing act. You should hire this act. It's incredible."
And the agent says, "Well, tell me what happens."
He says: Well, there's a family out on the stage.
There's a husband and a wife and three little girls, like 12, 8 and 4.
They're just sitting there and they're all reading.
There's a little ceramic ballerina going around playing Mozart music.
It's very calm and the lighting is beautiful.
And then the father gets up and he walks off stage
and he comes back with flowers
and he gives one to the wife and one to each of the daughters.
They go, "Oh, Daddy, we love you." "You're my precious angels."
And everything is so nice. Smiling.
Then the father gets up and he leaves again
and he comes back with a big bottle of whisky and a baseball bat.
He starts drinking the whisky
and he goes to the wife and starts smashing her round the shoulders and legs.
He's banging her legs and there's blood gushing everywhere
and the daughters are screaming and he chases them and smashes them on the back of the leg.
There's screaming and blood everywhere.
And the guy said, "That's horrible..."
The agent said, "That's the most horrible thing I've ever heard.
What could this thing be called? What is this? What is it?"
And the guy said, "It's called the Aristocrats."
And then they just blankly looked at each other for a while and then...
the agent said, "I'd like to see that, actually."
It's this family - the Cavanaghs - Anne and William.
They're eating dinner and they just finish.
Their maid comes in and she clears the plates.
They have two children - Betsy and Timmy.
Anne suggests that they all go into the drawing room,
where Anne then braids Betsy's beautiful blonde hair.
The husband plays chess with Timmy.
Then the maid comes in with strawberries and whipped cream.
They all eat a nice dessert.
That's the act.
- What would you call an act like that? - The Cocksucking Motherfuckers.
There is another which uses the same word - aristocrats - so maybe we can go there instead.
There were three missionaries -
a Catholic, a Buddhist and a Jew - who were out in the middle of Africa.
They were caught by headhunters.
The chief came up and said, "Good afternoon, gentlemen.
You have your options - death or... you can meet the Aristocrats.
First is the Jewish rabbi.
"Have you made up your mind?" He says, "Absolutely.
Perhaps there's an afterlife. I'm not really sure about that.
We certainly value the life on Earth.
I have decided I will go with meeting the Aristocrats."
Out come about 14 men, wearing just the skimpiest little loincloths.
They ream him in every orifice.
They throw his body up. They throw his body down.
He is completely covered with aborigine spermatozoa.
They leave him, basically, as a floppy little rag doll, over in the bushes.
He asks the Catholic priest, "How about you?"
"Still the same deal?" And he says, "Yeah, you can either die or deal with the Aristocrats."
He says, "Horrible as that is, I am no stranger to certain aspects of it.
I do see that the man over there is still breathing. I could stay alive and help my parishioners.
I will take the... I guess, the Aristocrats.
It's same song, second verse.
They have him in so many ways that he has never even dreamt of.
He is lying, panting barely audible breaths, lying in the underbrush.
The Buddhist says, "I believe that we are only here for a short time anyway.
I will take death."
The chief says, "OK, fine. Death it is.
But, first, the Aristocrats."
So, that'll be my Aristocrats joke. You've got 75 people telling the fucking thing.
This joke is one of those songs, I guess, like Mr Tambourine Man.
You could sing it like Bob Dylan or you could sing it like The Byrds.
You could sing it rough or make it sweet.
There's not that many jokes like this.
We were influenced by one of the greatest juggling acts of all time.
- They'd be completely naked. - At this point, he would penetrate the other guy.
The top guy would actually defecate on the bottom guy.
They would actually juggle six severed, flaming, elephant penises.
Yeah.
The were called The Incredible Towering
Flaming Naked Elephant Penis Juggling Brothers.
They changed it to the Aristocrats.
You can make the joke funny and still keep it in your personality.
I saw Christopher Walken tell that story.
I think it was James Lipton's Cocksucking Extravaganza.
He laid claim to the story actually happening.
This happened. My uncle was a talent agent. Sort of a Broadway Danny Rose sort of guy.
A man comes in and says to my uncle,
"I think I might have the act that you're looking for.
It involves my whole family."
My uncle stopped him and said...
"That's crazy. What do you mean, your whole family?"
The man says, "A gift my wife has is unloaded on the audience
and that is projectile vomiting.
It's all over the front row.
Gallagher, that putz, would wish... this sort of...
... this sort of thing was possible from a watermelon. Forget it."
This is what's happening to my uncle. He starts to chuckle.
But he also is frightened for his life.
He senses, "Ask the name first, then get him out.
Don't give him the bum's rush cos this fuck will kill you. Clearly."
To me, in this joke, you get to show off your writing. Sort of.
A family walks into the agent's office and they want to audition their new act.
Mom does a naked cartwheel through the air and lands flat on her back.
She spreads her legs wide and turns over to reveal...
a cherry-coloured ass.
Son comes over and begins to jack off.
The vigour of youth allows him to do this over and over again.
Sis, whose tits are practically non-existent, suddenly gets down on all fours.
Her hairless paper cut begins twitching with anticipation.
Dad springs into action.
He spins his daughter around and gives her a little bit of 69.
Just then there's a blinding spray that covers the entire family
and Grandma rides in on a red bicycle, pisses all over everyone, and says, "Ta-da!"
The agent says, "That's amazing. What do you call yourselves?"
Grandma says..."The Aristocrats."
We saw the act and it just dumbstruck Teller, quite literally.
I can go into the whole thing.
The father who played the bagpipes out his ass,
the mother who did this whole weird thing with menstrual blood, and er...
Yeah, beautiful. But the part that killed us the most was this little cute kid. About six?
The kid had this enormous cock.
It was the size of... you know...
Oh, like the size of a bottle, like that.
And he started jerking and jerking and jerking and jerking.
Just as he got to the final end, he would just jerk, jerk, and the kid had...
The whole head of his cock blew off.
And we said, "Fabulous. Fabulous."
Teller couldn't talk any longer. He was just shocked. Dumbstruck.
Just never spoke again.
The kid was also dumbstruck. He had the head of his cock blown off.
You're telling a joke in your own words and creating your own setup.
If that can be personalised, then that's a form of writing.
First I come in there and I start to get loosened up a little bit.
Then I start to stretch my face.
Then I like to celebrate the theatre. Comedy.
Tragedy.
And then Uncle Louie comes in.
And then cousin Eddie. He just came back from Russia with the army.
# Deutschland Deutschland, Yugoslavia
I got it.
And then, Aunt Sadie comes in and does an acrobatic number.
Hey-oh!
A guy goes into a talent agent and he says, "Dude, check it out. I've got a great act."
He's like, "It's not a fuckin' prop act, is it?"
I would tell that joke but I only work off prompter.
So unless I can look in the prompter and see...
Was it, "Fingering the daughter and eating shit out of the grandmother's ass"?
I'd hate to get something like that wrong cos it seems to be so delicately worded.
We all have different kinds of cartoons playing in the comic's mind.
Murray the agent barges into Stan the variety booker's office.
Stan goes, "No, no, no! No, you don't!
You always bring me the worst acts in the universe."
"This one is completely different, Stan, it's a family act.
First the father comes out, naked as the day he was born.
And he sets up a ladder.
Then Mom comes out, and she looks fantastic for her age.
She climbs halfway up the ladder, naked as the day she was born.
Then Junior steps out, a strapping young lad, naked as the day he was born.
And he climbs all the way to the top of the ladder.
Dad lights a cigar, gets it smoking good,
sticks it in Mom's ass, she blows a smoke ring out of her twat and the son dives through it."
Everybody loves it in circuses where they fit a bunch of clowns in a car,
and they all come out, and in the audience you see the kids' eyes just open up with awe.
It's just the most amazing thing.
It's like that, except we all fit into this woman's cunt.
She rides around a little ring on a bicycle,
and when she stops, we all pop out of her cunt
and spit cunt juice at the audience, which gets them involved.
They get a little wet - it's like kind of a Gallagher thing.
Sometimes there's mucous and little cunt loogies.
And we can make little animals and things like that out of the...
the cunt snot.
And we give those to the kids.
Terrific.
Others will have more irony or slightly more sarcasm.
A wry sense of looking at the world.
The guy goes in to get an agent. The agent says, "What do you guys do?"
"My wife and I..." Have you heard this one?
It wouldn't be The Onion if it didn't have Jesus in it.
We have to have the grandfather fucking Jesus in the ass.
You know what is offensive now? Gay bashing.
But if it's gay bashing, we can't have any gay sex in the act.
Throwing in gay sex has never deterred anyone from bashing gays.
I think they could do both.
I think they could sodomise Jesus up the ass and say...
"This is because you're a faggot."
"You probably like this, faggot!"
There are guys who are made to tell this joke.
Some people think I have a reputation of being a dirty comedian. I don't want to expose that.
I'm really a family kind of oriented guy.
Which brings me to this joke.
Oh, Saget. Now there is a man who walks around telling the Aristocrat joke in life.
That's my friend Paul, and I'm looking at his dinger.
He's got a very huge wiener. It's about that big.
I believe that's Shandling's joke. I'm pretty sure.
When you lift something, it better be a cock.
Once for Hanukkah, he gave me... some slim Tampax.
He said, "Leave 'em out, so guys will think you're really tight."
Here we go. This family...
mother, father and four kids.
Doesn't matter if they're boys or girls, they're going to be used anyway as just a hole.
It's what this joke's about anyway, using your kid...
They have a paper route, they go to school... and then you fuck 'em.
His aim is to get as many disgusting thoughts into sentences as possible.
The agent goes, "What do you people do?"
The father's, like, "Watch us."
He takes his wife's bra, and he rips off her underwear,
he takes some of her pubes with it - it's horrible. Blood starts dripping down her legs.
He pulls out the tampon, throws it at the window and it sticks.
They go down on each other in different configurations...
it's 69, it's 29 - cos the kids are young - it's 9...
The father bends his kid over on the guy's desk and he's taking him from behind,
which isn't right.
If any of you people are doing this that are watching this,
if you're having sex with your family, I don't condone it, it's wrong.
I could do a lot of PSAs to support "Do not fuck your family".
So they're all fucking each other, right?
All of a sudden, the kid can't take it, diarrhoea starts squirting from his ass.
It's like a haemorrhaging shit ass.
The kid starts spinning in a circle cos he can't control it, it's like Curly and the Stooges.
The projectile shit is just flying out, it's going all over the room, like spin art.
You don't know whether to shit or puke in this room.
What the fuck am I doing?
Then... Wait, there's more.
You get to be a comic for comics.
This is... This is fun.
They start singing Make 'Em Laugh.
And Be A Clown.
The father's haemorrhoid pops, so he grabs it and puts it on the end of his nose,
like Emmett Kelly - except he's covered in shit.
Then they all start making out.
You know, they're...
All kidding aside.
By the way, this would be a good time right now to take your pants off and get some lotion.
That's what happens next with this family. They just start jacking and...
Can I get a copy of this? I'd like to send it to the kids on the show Full House.
It was just an opportunity to be vile for no reason at all. So I used to love it.
Father can't help himself, smacks his wife in the mouth, knocks all of her teeth out.
Sticks his fist, accidentally, mind you, down her toothless throat.
Unbelievably, he actually fists her neck.
I love the idea of floating right past that,
as if this is the most normal... and the thing you're most used to doing.
I come inside my daughter's asshole.
And then my wife feltches... I'm not sure if you're familiar with feltching.
Feltching is where you fuck someone in the ass and then you...
... suck the come out.
Tasty.
Jis straight is good,
but if it has that little taste of shit...
We also have the dirty Sanchez.
That's when you fuck someone in the ass, pull it out and give the girl a moustache,
with the shit on your dick.
Mexican moustache.
Then there's the strawberry shortcake.
He jerks off on her face and punches her in the nose.
She's bleeding and there's white...
A rusty trombone, obviously, you know.
Come on. The rusty trombone people have heard of.
You spread a man's asshole,
and then there's the rusty hole...
And I lick his ass while I reach around and jerk him off.
And that's how you...
Space docking, where you take a shit in a girl's pussy. I don't think anyone has.
I would make sure that I was treating those things as...
"And then he took the carburettor, and he began to take the carburettor apart..."
"I'm fucking my daughter, understand, while she's knobbing my son."
And he's not trying to be foul.
He believes..."It's really quite novel what we do and you'd be crazy not to hire us."
Make it as matter of fact as possible.
That's the joy for me of saying something that violates someone's boundaries.
The mother clips the nails off her hand, puts it up her daughter
and starts working her like a puppet.
The father's got smelling salts that he's been giving to his kids,
who keep passing out.
Their heads are bleeding and they've been anally raped in front of an agent...
The mother had a big boil on her back - that popped.
Always make sure you haven't left anything out,
because you know there's always the chance to be topped.
He takes out his penis and goes over to the agent's desk.
He starts slamming his dick in the drawer.
Just flattens it right out like a bookmark.
Then starts smacking his kids with it, like a wet towel at the gym.
He knocks one of his kids in the eye and it pops out.
He looks at that as an opportunity, mind you.
Just trying to go further than anyone had ever gone before.
He just puts his flat wiener right in that eye socket.
Gets caught - gets caught on the back of his retina.
He starts trying to get him off of him,
and he's cock-eyed... no.
So all this was going on...
I gotta go on. I'm sorry, I got people to entertain.
Excuse me.
What is so unique about this joke,
is that it's so absurdly front loaded that it's almost the opposite of a joke.
Steam is built up in the setup.
There's something very satisfying in that structure.
Momentum, momentum, momentum and... the punch line means nothing.
There's something very satisfying in that.
But it is the kind of joke that, you know,
if you spent this much time on a setup and the punch line was "Aristocrats"...
most people are gonna go...
He says, "The Aristocrats."
Oh, lord.
Here, have some money.
The punch line is almost intentionally...
not lame, but weaker than you might have expected it to be.
But the journey is so much fun that you just don't care.
I'm not even sure what this means.
The punch line can be the icing on the cake, but the cake can be really delicious.
They slice a line that runs up the middle of a testicle,
it's like a butterfly shrimp at Benihana.
Now it looks like some strange sort of mouth.
They have ventriloquist nut sacks.
Then they brought some children out on stage.
That was sweet. One guy lays down... he's got a rod the size of my arm...
and balanced the kid, up his ass on the guy's rod.
Then they jerk the kid off, get the kid hard, they put another naked kid, his ass on that...
- They're building like a tower. - Something you gotta see to believe.
By spinning each kid in a different direction, you get this kind of thing...
It was lovely and had great lighting.
There are people who tell it who tunnel and make it great,
and make the act more interesting and fabulous.
And then the animal part came on. I'm trying to remember everything I saw.
- Donkey, Ilama, camel... - Something that looked like a bison, I guess...
An animal that they brought out that you were rubbing.
- That wasn't an animal. - What was it?
It wasn't an animal.
We're so conditioned now to sitcom humour,
where it's setup, punch line.
They think they're missing it, they don't know the journey is the fun.
What intrigues me is how in America you can laugh at something like Aristocrats.
You don't have aristocrats. Why does that work in America?
That much foul filth needs a word like "aristocrats".
It almost sounds quaint that you can put a cute cap on something that rancid
that's just as ugly as you can be, and is like "the Aristocrats".
A form of society that doesn't even exist.
I'm not gonna lie. The first time I heard it, I said, "What's an aristocrat?"
I had no idea.
Just this odd word.
But it's the only word that would satisfy that hunk of filth.
I have heard the twist of calling them "the Sophisticates."
Also works. Actually, maybe even a little better.
Maybe a little better. That's nice, the Sophisticates.
I personally think it's a much better joke.
It's the goofiness of a person turning the joke upon themselves.
Whereas aristocrats are seldom self-appointed.
- Therefore the joke is satire. - That's a political statement.
You know what would be great to add to this?
Just add Republican.
And the Democrats. It's not about them and Republicans.
Because of the language and the images,
that gives it a political slant.
I don't think the original intent was to do anything but tell a wild joke.
There's no act in England that an aristocrat wouldn't do...
... that doesn't involve shagging animals or fist-fucking cows, or anything.
This was the evening of Monty Python And The Holy Grail.
As you can see, there's our friend Eric Idle, George Harrison and Terry Gilliam.
We were just telling jokes,
and George said, "Instead of aristocrat or sophisticates, we use royalty."
Which is an even funnier joke.
An English one is "debonairs", but that doesn't grab me.
When I heard it, it was the Debonairs.
Which I think is even funnier.
It has a certain je ne sais quoi.
The Debonairs? I like that.
The Aristocrats is pretty funny, the more you think about it.
Whatever the other guys are telling you, I have the original.
People signed the Declaration of Independence, there was a big party - that's the way it was told.
I'm from Philadelphia. Go to Independence Hall, see the Liberty Bell, the Declaration.
There is a framed sketch of the original telling of the Aristocrats.
And you see Ben Franklin laughing,
and you see Betsy Roth taking a dump.
Because the original joke, when they slid through the shit and vomit, they hit the bell.
And that's what cracked the bell.
Look at the signers, there's one very heavy signer.
He's the one that fucked up the bell.
I told the original. People are gonna tell the Aristocrats a different way. That's fucked.
Er... this joke...
my grandfather told my father, he heard it from his grandfather...
It goes all the way back, this joke.
Sometimes it was known as the tale of Pushtuchkin,
the gay rabbi.
Was ist das? Die Aristocrats!
There's a similar tale, it gets mixed up.
My grandfather took this joke so far,
his entire life - he lived 67 years -
always in a constant state of this joke.
Constant - eat, everything he did, marry...
children, everything.
It was setup, setup, setup, setup.
And then, just the moment he died, punch line.
"What do they call this act?" "The Aristocrats." He's dead.
And you know, we laughed.
Grandpa's dead and we went, "Oh, the Aristocrats!"
I get it all of a sudden, his entire life.
I get this.
We thought, and we were right, that he was crazy.
What he did, no-one will top him.
No-one will top this guy.
Uncle Yanush.
My grandfather's...
See, that's bad improv right there.
My grandfather, Uncle Yanush.
I remember being at school and I remember going home,
and my grandmother sitting me down and telling me the joke.
She's from Poland, so she only spoke Yiddish.
The only English word she knew was "cunt".
I remember "cunt".
And I remember her saying, "Eat, eat."
And "cunt".
You know, now that I think back on it, it's probably wrong.
There was this story my mother used to tell me.
There was a goat in Tammy
that my father got very involved with
while he was working - they went on the road with this act.
My father was blowing this goat over at MGM and my mother walked in on them.
And my mother just thought that was adorable.
My mother is a golden shower queen.
The original movie of Singin' In The Rain was a huge golden shower extravaganza.
But it didn't get past the censors, which is a shame,
because there were some wonderful numbers with Mickey Rooney...
who was huge with fisting.
In the early days in Hollywood, it was completely accepted.
I always love show business jokes.
These ones that seem a little more inside.
And in a very sort of twisted, warped way,
this disgusting, foul joke is a joke about the sweet old days of show business.
I'm going to sit on top of the piano and fit the whole thing in my vagina.
The percussionist - I love that word, "percussionist" -
is gonna take his triangle, put it in front of my triangle,
and kling-a-ling-a-ling with the trolley, just the way mama sang it.
And then I'm gonna take the banger to the triangle, and kling-a-ling it,
until my clitoris swells up into a large Macy's Day Parade balloon.
I'm gonna take it and stretch it out,
and I'm gonna wrap it round the microphone cord and fling it over my shoulder
the way Mama used to do.
As I'm singing,
# What'll I have that I don't... ... have
Where did that note go?
And then the rest of the band's gonna jump up, and we're gonna sing.
# Shine your shoes, shine your shoes
And I'm gonna shine my shoes with my vagina juices,
put 'em back on, tap, tap, tap, do a split, and that's the act.
I'm gonna call it...
... the Aristocrats.
Isn't that terrific?
This is a joke exclusive to show business.
You'd never hear a physicist going, "It's a muon, you cunt."
I have a joke very similar to "That's why the group is called Aristocrats",
in the show business theme with a nice turn.
There's an audition for piano player at a very exclusive bar.
A guy shows up, and the owner says, "This is a very exclusive place.
I'd like you to play all different styles of music, but they have to be classy."
The guy says, "I can do anything."
He plays the most beautiful song the owner's ever heard.
He says, "I've never heard that before." "I wrote it myself."
"What's it called?"
"It's called 'My dog was fucking me in the ass while my cat was licking my balls'."
"That's awful. Do you have any other songs?"
"I have a wonderful thing I'll play for you."
He plays this kind of jazzy tune and they say, "Great! What was that?"
He says, "I ate your sister's bloody tampon."
"Hey, this a classy place. No more of that."
He goes, "Oh, fine. Fine."
"I really like your songs, I wanna hire you.
Play for my customers, just don't tell them any names of your songs."
That night he starts playing the piano and the crowd goes crazy, the songs were beautiful.
After an hour he says, "Give me a break, I've gotta go to the can."
He goes to the bathroom. On his way out, he forgets to zip up his pants.
Somebody says, "You know, your zipper's undone and your dick's hanging out."
He says, "Know it? I wrote it!"
That's what a group of entertainers have in common.
They understand they've seen shitty acts.
The worst bar band in Shitsville, Ohio,
always have a glorious name,
like, The Incredible Diamond-Studded Reefer Tones.
It's done in every aspect of life.
You'll see a little rundown greasy spoon diner,
calling itself The Gourmet Corner.
Besides from the humour of the joke there's a sadness,
that these people had no self-realisation
that what their act was would get them absolutely no place.
Yet they call themselves the Aristocrats,
because they're clinging to the very last vestige of respectability.
Absolutely no class, absolutely horrible.
But they are in show business and they are aristocrats.
I don't put the Aristocrats on my résumé any more, you know.
It doesn't take away from, like, my pride.
I actually was an Aristocrat.
It's kinda weird to be a part of that legend.
It was my mom, my dad, me, my brother... and my nana.
My father would come out on stage,
the music would play and he would start masturbating.
My brother comes out,
they do, like a mutual masturbation, kind of like a Dueling Banjos.
They're holding hands and they spin.
I stay in a stationary position.
When the assholes come by, I lick the assholes.
And in one motion, my mother... both pinkies up their assholes, as they come.
It's pretty... It's pretty spectacular.
And it's all about timing.
Like, on one level it's a joke about scatological humour and show business.
But on another level,
it's about a family,
it's about the hopes and dreams of that family...
My brother has Down's syndrome.
Did I say that?
People think it's a setback, but really...
it's a selling point.
It's not a handicap.
I don't wanna say it's a gift.
I mean, we think of it as a gift just in terms of ticket sales, but I mean...
we think of it as...
showing the other beauties that God creates,
like the ones with the bigger foreheads,
and the lower eyelids.
Did they ever ask you to be on The Tonight Show?
Not The Tonight Show.
But Joe Franklin loved the Aristocrats.
He was like our rehearsal director when Dad and my brother weren't there,
and my mother...
... and my nana... weren't there.
I was on his show.
He said it wasn't a taped show.
But...
we, like, did a show.
Like, in his apartment?
Yeah, it was his office.
But he had a... a bed in it...
like a couch that he called Uncle Joe's bed.
For little people. Cos a couch is like a bed for little people.
You know?
Joe Franklin raped me.
Comedians often feel like, "I am this weird, twisted, strange person,
somewhere near the outer reaches of the bell curve,
trying somehow to package this
in a way that confers upon me some kind of dignity and respect."
Maybe that's the reason that this joke is so appealing.
I've played by their rules for a really long time. I don't want to do it any more.
Will they prevent me from doing a show with the Olsen twins?
I think you're all skirting around this.
You should all be aristocrats. The audience, all of us should be aristocrats.
People are contracted into this puritanical idea
that we have to get married when we're young, we can't fuck boys and fuck girls.
We can do it all. Starfish are bi.
Have you seen a starfish eat out another starfish? It takes for ever. They do it.
Close the comedy clubs and open up brothels, bathhouses, glory holes.
This is what this country needs. It needs a really tight orgasm.
I'm an actor. I was in a lot of TV shows.
I went to this orgy once. I fucked all these people and somebody whispered in my ear,
"You were great on Friends."
But you're not going to have Mary Hart talk about that with me.
I want to take an approach to the joke in my way.
I'm the agent and I'm pitching it.
So this very athletic blond man walks onto the stage in a leather Speedo.
He has this slightly sadistic nature about him.
He has this fine, fine baby hair all over these very steely pectoral muscles.
He has like a treasure trail that goes down...
to heavy, cut man-meat. An 11 x7 cock.
He's horse-hung guy.
This chick walks up with a rocket body and artificial rack.
She looks like Carmen Electra, only better. She starts gently rubbing her pussy.
This submissive sissy boy comes out and points at the dick and says,
"I want that cock to bust my virgin ass."
The chick straps on this dildo,
has this challenging, intense expression on her face, and says, "Let me."
She rubs him in a very spiritually-centred way.
Little sissy boy is obviously a demanding pussy bottom.
He tilts his ass up.
She starts eating his ass, giving him this rim job royale, as they'd say in Pulp Fiction.
The horse-hung dick is now going into pussy boy's mouth. He's getting face-fucked.
The girl takes his cock in her pussy, but what she...
and this is gonna be in the programme,
that the girl has trained in that fine geisha way where the pussy would contract,
to make your vagina pull up on that cock.
When you are shooting, it is like yanking it.
I don't know if anyone's ever had that happen, but it's wild.
She is taking a huge fucking horse flow.
It's called the Massage-ocrats.
This joke holds a mirror up to itself.
The people who say the joke must contain shit - don't invite them into your home.
The people who say it must involve bestiality - don't let them near your dog.
This tells you a lot about a person, this joke.
It's where your darkest place can go, you know.
In a way, this joke really isn't all that relevant.
Standards of "offensive" change over time.
It's quite a tame joke now.
There's something quite charming about it, which is weird.
"I have got the perfect family act." "Go ahead. Tell me."
"The wife and I go out, we sing and dance, we fuck each other,
we fuck the kids, the kids fuck each other.
The dog shits and pisses on all of us. He looks up, jumps through a hoop."
"What do you call the act?" "The Aristocrats."
The agent goes, "I already have an act like that."
That's what happened to show business.
"Fuck the kids, fuck the dogs," doesn't matter. Well, I've already seen that.
That's not really a joke any more.
That's actually a really great idea to pitch to a network.
I could walk into NBC tomorrow and say I have a dysfunctional family idea.
So dysfunctional it defies description.
We have people fucking and sucking, diddling like an 11-year-old cheerleader.
We can bring in people from the past. They get those idiotic ads - Humphrey Bogart.
Get your major world leaders from the past, like Hitler, Mussolini, Genghis Khan.
I just thought of that!
It's not a joke! This will go on TV.
We blow Hitler, then in the next episode we bite his dick off. Ha ha!
See what happens to Hitler's dick. Phenomenal!
It's a family act but it's a twist, cos they're retarded.
What they do is, they get in a pile of dead nuns and they fuck each other,
then they have a big closing and fist-fuck an autistic pre-teen.
The agent says, "Well, what do you call 'em?"
And he says, "The Osbournes."
A lot of what is already on TV now, they would have the dog-fucking and the shit-eating on...
- Friends. - Not on Friends but on South Park.
- You guys want to hear a funny joke? - No.
This family walks into a talent agency.
Mother, father, son, daughter and a little baby.
The father says, "Sir, our family has an amazing act."
The agent says, "Family acts are too cutesy."
The mother goes, "Sir, just give us two minutes. We know you'll like our act."
The agent says, "All right, you've got two minutes."
Thrilling circus music starts as the father spins his daughter round,
- lifts her skirt and starts licking her asshole. - What?!
Then the son lays down, opens his mouth, and the mother squats down and shits all over him.
- Dude! - Hold on, hold on.
The father grabs the baby, takes off his diaper and sucks his cock,
while the son, with shit in his mouth, goes over and licks the baby's balls.
Then they take the baby and stuff it head-first into the mother's vagina.
- Just stop. - Hold on.
They get the baby halfway in so just its legs are sticking out.
The son takes the shit out of his mouth and rubs it all over everyone,
while the father sticks his cock in the baby's asshole and fucks it,
until he comes all over the baby, the wife, son and daughter.
- I don't want to... - Will you hold on, please?
Then the father says, "And now for our impersonation of the victims of 9/11."
The family runs around covered with shit, piss and come,
going, "Ah! The building's coming down! Help!"
The family runs back to the centre of the room and goes, "Ta-da!"
The talent agent just sits there. Finally, he says,
"That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?"
The father says, "The Aristocrats."
I don't get it.
Neither do I.
It's not transgressive any more.
We're re-inventing the joke by putting in stuff that's offensive now.
The world has changed.
Shockability had gone to a whole other level.
People say, "Nigger, spic, dick, cunt."
You can say all that, people go...
When you're among comedians, you have to push the envelope.
A comedian telling it to comedians?
He'd probably do a more disgusting version of it for his peers
than he would for his friends at the bar from the old neighbourhood.
It's like you're performing in front of your family, yet there's no holds barred.
There's a level of appreciation that will go along with it.
I dare you to tell that joke on stage in front of anyone.
If you can make an audience laugh at that, you are God.
I'm a writer at the New York Observer. For five years, I've covered the Friar's roast.
This year I wrote about Gilbert Gottfried's take on the Aristocrats.
Gilbert Gottfried did it at the Hugh Hefner roast.
It was the funniest fucking joke ever.
This roast was happening not even three weeks after September 11th,
so there was a big discussion about what was right in terms of taste.
There hadn't been any comedy in New York. It was very fresh.
We were faced with having to put up a show, put on tuxedos,
get Hugh Hefner and his pussy posse on a plane.
It wasn't easy but we got him to do it.
To his credit, we raised half a million dollars for charity, for 9/11 charities.
People needed a laugh, to release.
Everybody was pulling back. Everybody was really being careful.
Rob Schneider went on first.
He was doing great, then a couple of jokes didn't work.
I went up to the mike and I said, "Rob, hasn't there been enough bombing in this city?"
Here comes Gilbert and he just went for broke.
It was unbelievable.
Gilbert Gottfried took the mike, took the room over.
He said he was trying to get a direct flight to Los Angeles.
He was nervous cos his plane had a connection at the Empire State Building.
That was when the crowd turned.
They started booing him. A guy was shouting, "Too soon, too soon."
The crowd was murmuring and he said:
OK. A man...
A talent agent is sitting in his office.
A family walks in: man woman, their two kids, and their little dog.
The agent goes, "What kind of an act do you do?"
It was like he made a conscious decision, "OK, I can't push the envelope of taste
in terms of what happened in September, so I'll push it in a completely different direction."
It was arguably the dirtiest roast the Friar's had ever done.
The father starts fucking his wife, the wife starts jerking off the son,
the son starts going down on the sister,
the sister starts fingering the dog's asshole.
He just grabbed them by the throat. He just attacked.
Then the son starts blowing his father.
You want me to start at the beginning?
If you missed any portion, I'll repeat it.
There was this weird buzz that came.
The guys up on the dais were looking at each other with this look of familiarity in their eyes.
They were all saying, "Where is he going to take this?"
Then the daughter starts licking out the father's asshole.
Then the father shits on the floor, the mother shits on the floor.
The dog pisses and shits on the floor.
They all jump down into the shit and piss and come
and they start fucking and sucking each other,
and then they take a bow.
And the talent agent says...
I'll wait till you're ready.
I'm sitting at a table and the comics were on the floor.
They might have to clean this up for TV.
I was laughing cos he was going so big with it,
which I can't imagine Gilbert Gottfried doing.
It was probably one of the best single tellings of a joke I've ever heard.
Now, where was I? Oh, yes.
The son is licking out his father's asshole.
I almost died because I couldn't catch my breath with laughing.
They fuck and suck each other and they take a bow.
And the talent agent... Did you miss any portion of this?
The talent agent says, "Well, that's an interesting act."
Which is kind of an understatement.
The laugh was so deep and cathartic that people were coughing up pieces of lung.
It was amazing. A lot of people watching him, or up on the dais, are all in comedy
and it was as if he had united everybody in that one moment
because he told something that they all knew and they all had some sort of handle on it.
He focused it and clearly impressed a lot of people in the room.
Now...
He pulled this thing out and did it so well,
with such fearlessness.
I hate to end this on a really sentimental note.
There was a sound in the audience that you really knew something was happening.
It was outside my grasp, and for anyone else who wasn't a total comedy veteran.
Not a great joke.
On the other hand, hear Gilbert Gottfried tell a joke like that, it's a Picasso.
The joke I didn't care about any more.
I wanted to see how far he would take it,
and when he would not stop saying "fucking and sucking"...
Watching him go through his apoplectic,
rhythmic, incantation of the whole thing sort of takes over.
The fact that he is saying these particular words almost doesn't matter.
He says, "What do you call yourself?"
And they go, "The Aristocrats!"
It's just a joke.
Help!
Is it as shocking as the first time you heard it?
Don't touch me.
- Is that the joke as you remember it? - I didn't hear it that way.
This is so much worse.
I'm already feeling like I didn't do it justice.
I had "fucking the daughter" in there but I didn't colour it in with colourful adjectives.
"An arm like Popeye."
I didn't realise the bill that I was on.
What's the most vile, offensive thing you could add to top all that?
If a guy took some of the shit and smeared it on his face and did a black-face routine.
- Doing a minstrel act. - That's good.
Add race-baiting.
Sex any more? Who gives a shit? The racial issue has replaced the sexual issue.
- I'm the agent and you're the client. - OK.
Are you a Jew agent, you filthy, hook-nosed, thieving fuck?
Yeah.
He goes, "A Black guy comes on and starts sucking my cock like it's a chicken neck bone.
This Indian comes on - you know, Slurpee Indian, not casino Indian...
...sprinkles curry on everybody...
... and starts stinking up the place.
A spic comes on, steals everybody's wallet and takes a shit on the stage.
The Black guy grabs a mop, sticks it up the gay guy's ass and mops up the fucking floor."
The agent says, "Holy shit, what do you guys call yourselves?"
The fag goes, "The Aristocrats."
One of the clichés people often go to is...
Now, some people do this for shock value.
Shock is just another uptown word for surprise.
Granted it has a different quality to it, but a joke is about surprising someone.
Three women of colour go to this agent.
He goes, "What do you do?"
"My sister plays the cello. She plays Chopin's Third Movement in B Minor.
I lay on a chaise longue nude, reading sonnets from Shakespeare.
My third sister paints a painting very similar to Delacroix's The Girl."
He says, "Wow, what do you call this act?"
She goes, "Oh, we're Nigger Cunts."
You can't say that.
The two worst words in the world.
I'm a great believer in context. You can joke about anything.
Funny is funny. If told with a funny bone, anything's acceptable.
Let's have some fun.
After the tragic events of January 3rd, come on.
On January 3rd, I left my Visa at the Four Seasons, it was like...
I do like finding out where the line is drawn,
deliberately crossing it and bringing some of them with me across the line,
and having them be happy that I did.
I like to take chances,
because I just think that you should.
That's what comedy is all about.
I pull up Mommy's dress, and I put my wiener in her butt.
And I push it into her unwilling anus.
And I move my wiener back and forth until stuff shoots out.
So it's finally just a whole prolapsed rectum.
It looks like an ulcerated sea snake.
Remember when I took you to SeaWorld? Yeah.
And all the stuff shoots onto her face.
I stick my cock in her ass,
and it's like a shillelagh, all knotted with boils and fibrous tumours.
I'll show you a little bit later.
The brother comes out. He eats the stuff off her face.
With his bleeding anus splattering on the crowd.
We give the front row garbage bags. Have you ever seen Gallagher?
- Yeah, I didn't like it that much myself.
They ate the poop off the floor.
And he says, "Ta-da!"
And the man says, "The Aristocrats."
And both of the men are probably Jews.
There's still a joke out there that maybe they shouldn't tell.
Maybe they're taking a chance telling.
Maybe they get a little bit nervous as they start the joke.
It means something, even in today's day and age.
They just get a little murmur inside,
and I think that will be what keeps a joke like this special.
I never realised any of that stuff was considered dirty.
Before you guys got here, I was eating a plate of my own shit.
Hey, Mel. Do you know this joke about...
The punch line is "The Aristocrats."
I totally do not get it.
- You don't get the joke? - Someone told it to me but I don't get it.
The whole family's having sex with each other.
- Is that aristocratic? - It's more than that.
Um...
Yeah, I think it's best if we don't break it down. Do you agree with that?
No, I don't want to tell the joke.
You've had way too many great people tell it.
The Aristocrats!
That's great.
The best-Iooking ass in show business.
Don't ever ask me to do another favour for you.
I guarantee this will not wind up on my demo tape.
I'm not gonna work for Disney ever again.
Thanks a lot, Paul Provenza.
I once asked Dom Irrera, why does anal sex play such a huge role in humour?
He said, "I can't tell you but I can show you."
Sarah Silverman is a young lady to watch.
I'll keep an eye on her.
- You've never met her? - No.
Does everyone do this or not?
All right. Fuck, shit, cunt.
A man goes into a pub and another guy hits him on the head with an iron bar.
He says, "Is that serious or a joke?"
He says, "It's serious." "Thank God. I can't stand jokes like that."
Is any of this funny?
Don't pan to them. Stay on me.
Don't look at them. There's gonna be problems. OK.
Brunch is gonna be up in Redford's thing. 2020.
I'll try to be alive for it.
It's not often you talk about cunts for 10 minutes and somebody behind a camera goes,
"Perfect. That's exactly what we need."
A guy sees two priests having supper together.
He says, "I didn't know whether to send them a bottle of wine or a cub scout."
The dog's name is Peanuts and she is blind.
She wasn't blind when we got her,
but we blinded her just so she'd be a little bit more fun.
- Er... That's good.
- Er... - That's good.
Is this thing on?
Argh!
To the other comedians: I don't know what you're getting,
but they refused to pay me and I'm really steamed. Steamed!
And the agent says...
What the fuck am I doing?
- Do other people get laughs out of this? - I think so.
And he says, "The Aristocrats!"
Cos it's absolutely the wrong thing to call an act like that.
Is it on?
You're not taping yet really, are you?
Goodbye!
- The mike! - I forgot we had the mike on.
Try this. Ball sacks.
I said ball sacks in front of a six-year-old girl. They'll take my six-year-old away from me.
Bye, Robert. Daddy loves you.
I often sit here in my garden, gazing into my Victorian reflecting ball, and...
Darling, would you get me a cup of tea?
Get it yourself.
I just want to thank you. It's so nice to be part of this extraordinary experience.
A rabbi walks into a bar with a frog.
Bartender says, "Where did you get that?"
The frog says, "Brooklyn. There's hundred of 'em."
Good luck.
I feel like we're all connecting.
And now the world's oldest living vaudevillian with the original Aristocratsjoke.
This way. This way.
There are these two mountain goats and they...
Sir? Sir?
- Sir? - Huh?
Thank you.
The Aristocrats.