Hey folks, Harry here kicking himself with his one good foot regarding not having the chance to see THE ARISTOCRATS. ARGH! Here's 1 Haute Mama with the story...
Going into The Aristocrats, I figured the joke that gets retold ad infinitum (ad
nauseam to some) in this film would play on typical bourgeois sensibilities
about the wealthy: they may have the money, but we have the moral values.
Director Paul Provenza, however, called it a love story in his opening
comments, and he's right--but what an absurd love story it is!
My mom and I love to be scandalized. Perhaps we can live a little vicariously
by just hearing and hearing about the outrageous things other people do or say.
We are like Phyllis Diller as she talks about the joke in the film--we feign
horror at it pierces the depths of scatology, but in truth we are tickled
completely and irrevocably pink.
The Aristocrats has accomplished an amazing thing. This joke, at least twice as
old as the oldest man they interviewed (that's almost 200 years, folks), doesn't
get told to regular audiences because it is, as NYT columnist Frank Rich has it
in his column this week, the Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told, read: the complete,
total opposite of the Greatest Story Ever Told. Both are stories of families,
true, but only the joke has incest, fisting, piss, blood, and shit (in all its
various forms and consistencies). And only the joke exists in infinite
varieties, even changing with each telling.
This joke pushes the envelope of what is acceptable harder than anything I've
ever heard--according to Provenza, when I asked him about the rating it would
get, he says it's going to be unrated. That's pretty barve. This film is all
about the telling of the story, which my mom and I as English geeks absolutely
get. And because it truly is a love story of the oddest sort, I can't wait to
get the DVD--which Provenza says should be chock full of goodies--and share it
with my mom.
1 Haute Mama
