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Have you heard the one about . . .
... the 100 comics who start telling the same private joke . . . and turn it into an obscenity-laden improv exercise that becomes a movie called The Aristocrats? Let Penn Jillette explain.
By STEVE PERSALL
Published August 12, 2005
For his next trick, comic illusionist Penn Jillette will make conversational punctuation disappear.
There's a good reason why Jillette's longtime accomplice in sleight of hand, Teller, doesn't speak. Words need to be coated in Teflon and walk on tiptoes to sneak in edgewise. When Jillette gets pumped about a topic, commas and periods become "ands" and "so's," creating a nearly ceaseless flow of ideas that ends only when it's time to laugh at what he's saying, or when oxygen becomes an even more pressing necessity than usual.
Penn Jillette is pumped about The Aristocrats, a documentary he created with comedian Paul Provenza, which is either taking moviegoers by storm or sending them storming to the exits. That's all because 100 of the best-known standup comics today take turns in the film telling the filthiest joke ever, dissecting it obscenity by obscenity, illuminating the improvisational process that makes it unique.
The film opens in select local theaters on Aug. 26.
The Aristocrats is gutter speak of the highest degree, challenging funny bones and sensitivities to see how much they can take.
The joke goes something like this:
A man walks into a talent agent's office and says: "I have the most amazing act in the world for you to book, featuring my entire family of performers." The talent agent says: "Okay, tell me about it."
(Insert the most disgusting elements of scatology, sexual debasement, incest, violence and/or bestiality imaginable, for as long as you can continue spewing it.)
The shocked talent agent hears this and says: "Wow, that's quite an act. What do you call yourselves?"
The man stiffens with pride and declares: "The Aristocrats!"
That joke has been a secret handshake among comedians since vaudeville, something to tinker with while killing time between shows, or pull out in desperation when the audience isn't laughing. It's the triple axel of standup comedy, separating contenders from champions by how originally lewd they can be. Jillette and Provenza use their movie to show regular folks what goes on behind the curtains of comedians' minds. Comedy, as Steve Martin philosophized long ago, isn't pretty.
"The whole thing comes from Provenza and I talking about be-bop jazz about five years ago when I got obsessed with it, and still am," Jillette said during a telephone interview, just getting warmed up. "I was just learning to play upright bass and I was talking to Provenza for hours because that's what we do when we get together over the past 15 years; we talk for hours, very pretentiously, very pseudo-intellectually.
"I was talking about listening to (Charlie) Mingus and how improvisation requires skills and knowing the dorian scale fits over the diminished chord, and also has riffs you've heard from other people, then having true inspiration in real time. That's what the word "improvisation' is supposed to mean.
"We started comparing that to comedy, and it turned into a conversation comparing Gilbert Gottfried to Miles Davis. The more we talked about it, the more they were doing the exact same thing, so we got the idea of having a bunch of people telling a joke in improvisations.
"It was really meant to be this thesis on comedy, intended for the people in the movie and other hard-core fans of comedy, a love letter to the culture of comedy and these specific comedians. We expected very few people to understand it."
Oh, but they have. The Aristocrats "killed" at the Sundance Film Festival in January; ThinkFilm picked up the distribution rights. Recent introductory runs in New York and Los Angeles garnered a number of rave reviews and impressive ticket sales. Some moviegoers walk out early, shocked by the obscene language employed by such comedians as Gottfried, George Carlin, Bob Saget, Chris Rock and the Smothers Brothers. More viewers stick around to the hilarious end.
AMC Entertainment banned The Aristocrats from its theaters nationwide. At least one Internet site for religious perspectives panned the movie, yet allowed it's very funny and a sharp analysis of the comedic process.
"The negative side so far has been predominantly nut-bags - Christian Web sites and a guy from a theater chain who wanted to get his name in the paper, who I don't think even saw the movie, but saw a press opportunity," Jillette said.
"I think it was Laurence Olivier who said that one of the things you have to accept in art is that when you put your heart into doing something there will be people who don't like it for really good reasons, really smart people who don't like what you've done for very valid reasons. That is hard to accept, that there are really valid reasons for not liking anything. The astonishing thing is that there haven't been many valid reasons for anyone not to like this movie."
If nothing else, viewers must admire Jillette and Provenza's perseverance in bringing The Aristocrats to the screen. That conversation about improvisation inspired the pair to use consumer-level video equipment to record their friends Bobby Slayton and Rick Overton as a test for the idea. Then they spent four years calling up comedians on their days off. The result was 140 hours of footage then trimmed to an 84-minute film.
"Provenza transcribed every minute of those hours on a computer. That allowed him to manipulate the information in his head, very much like Mozart, I would think," Jillette said. The Aristocrats was assembled with Final Cut Pro software, which costs less than $1,000 and is available to all consumers.
Selecting which parts would remain often became something like Sophie's Choice. Jillette is aware that some important themes were excised, or diluted, sometimes painfully so, but doing so was necessary.
"The original cut of the movie was 2 hours and 20 minutes long," he said. "That version needed nothing cut from it. It was a perfect statement. We watched it and said, okay, we have a choice now.
"I really believe that art thrives in its limitations. So, we said: Well, we're asking people to accept an unrated movie, we're asking people to accept obscenity from people they're not used to hearing it from, we're going to ask people to take the intellectual leap of understanding improvisation and compare it to jazz. Do we really have to give them Shoah on top of all that?
"I love to find what the rules are that I want to follow, then follow them.
"Thirty years ago, this movie (would have) cost two orders of magnitude more to make," Jillette said. "Ten years ago, this (would have) cost one order of magnitude more to make. You had to really hock your house to make a movie. I make good money with the Penn & Teller show, and Provenza does very well as a comic. But Orson Welles said years ago that film would never really be art until tools were as cheap as pencils and paper. They're not that cheap, but people in our range can make a movie like this.
"We were in a position to make a movie for our friends. And if more people happen to like it, well, that feels groovy. But if they don't, you haven't risked too much. When you get to the point where people don't have to risk much to do art, you're going to get wackier art."
Just like Al Gore's new enterprise, the Current television network, I suggested.
"Well, see, there's a downside to that, too," joked Jillette.
"But it's the same idea. Provenza and I have an obsession with this joke and the concept of improvisation, so we made this movie. That's what movies should do: Take a personal obsession and pull it out and make it more important. Every movie you see should make you say, "Wow, someone cares about this.' They should all be about alien subcultures.
"I think we're much more similar to March of the Penguins; just a group of creatures freezing in their lost world. I loved that movie, and I'm so happy it's going to kick Michael Moore's a--. It's just an American embarrassment that Michael Moore has the highest grossing documentary ever. It'll be great when March of the Penguins goes by (Fahrenheit 9/11) and shows the world that a movie based on love can beat a movie based on hate."
I expressed surprise that Jillette would speak so passionately about creative freedom with one breath then jab Moore with the next.
"But, you see, I'm a libertarian and that always (messes) people up because that's as far right and as far left as you can go," he said. "I'm as far left as you can go on sex, and as far right as you can go on money. If you want to find utopia, take a sharp right on money and a left on sex and there it is, dead ahead."
-- Steve Persall can be reached at 727 893-8365 or persall@sptimes.com
[Last modified August 11, 2005, 08:56:11]
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