The aristocrats

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Aristocrats ("The Aristocrats ") is a joke that has been told by American stand-up comedians in ever new variations for decades . The challenge lies in indulging in ever more grotesque tastelessness within a given framework in free improvisation , thus inventing the “dirtiest” joke imaginable. It is the subject of the documentary of the same name, The Aristocrats (2005), in which many of the leading American comedians commented on the origin, theory and performance practice of this joke.

Context, structure and content

The historical-cultural background of the action is the American vaudeville of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an entertainment theater close to the classic European circus , in which artistic and comedic interludes were offered.

The Aristocrats consists of three parts, the beginning and the end are always the same, while the middle part is freely improvised:

1) an artist family (generally father, mother, daughter, son, often also the grandparents and / or a dog) visits a talent agency. The agent asks the father what the number they are offering him consists of.
2) the father now explains what the family has studied. The number consists of a sequence of unspeakable bizarre sexual acts involving all family members from children (whether born or in utero) to grandparents (whether alive or dead), in the words of Stuart Moulthrop a " Homeric catalog of orifices, parts , Products and possibilities ”. The usual set pieces include every conceivable and unthinkable paraphilia and perversion ( incest , child abuse , sodomy , necrophilia ), the imaginative use of all limbs, body orifices, body fluids and excretions ( coprophilia , coprophagia ), and often also violence up to murder, Manslaughter and cannibalism, consistently depicted in drastic swear words, i.e. in vulgar , especially fecal language (scatology).
3) the perplexed agent asks the father under which name the family with this number intends to appear. The father replies, often accompanied by a theatrical snap of his fingers: "The Aristocrats!"

The concluding “The Aristocrats!” Represents the punchline or punchline in the traditional sense and alludes to the topos of decadence of the higher circles, which has been widespread since the French Revolution , but the actually comical moment shifts to the improvised middle section.

example

The cultural scientist Gershon Legman gives a short, comparatively harmless version of the joke in his humorous treatise Rationale of the Dirty Joke (1975):

A vaudeville performer is describing his act to a skeptical booking agent. 'It's very simple. My wife and I shit on the stage, and then the kids come out and wallow in it. ' Agent, thunderstruck: 'What kind of an act do you call that?' Vaudevillian, polishing his fingernails on his lapel: 'We call it…' The Aristocrats '!'

“A vaudeville actor explains his number to a skeptical agent: 'It's very simple. My wife and I poop on stage, then the kids come and wallow in it. ' Then the shocked agent: 'What kind of number is that supposed to be?' Then the actor, polishing his fingernails on his lapel: 'We call them ...' The Aristocrats! '""

history

Advertising poster for a vaudeville company, 1894

The origins of the joke are difficult to trace: on the one hand, the stand-up comedy numbers are purely oral, and on the other hand, the willful violation of all the conventions of what is permitted in terms of taste also prohibits its recording, and widespread distribution via media such as television. The documentary The Aristocrats , released in 2005 and filmed by the two comedians Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza , made the joke known to a wider audience as an attempt to explore the history of the phenomenon using oral history . In it, many of the leading American comedians were asked about the joke and some asked to perform their own version, including George Carlin , Drew Carey , Robin Williams , Jon Stewart , Phyllis Diller and Whoopi Goldberg .

It has often been stated that The Aristocrats is a group or profession-specific insider joke that can be traced back to the origins of comedy in the vaudeville theater and is passed down orally by the “initiated” from generation to generation . Because of its disregard for moral norms, it is not intended for a paying audience, but a milieu-specific ritual that comedians practiced after the curtain fell. It was a competition with certain rules: the improvisation of the middle section should be spun on as long as possible without repeating motifs. Masters of the trade are said to have held out for over half an hour and longer. Furthermore, rumors are spread in the film that Chevy Chase often threw parties in his house that were exclusively dedicated to the maintenance and performance of this tradition; The Aristocrats should also have been Johnny Carson's favorite joke.

The "arcane" character of this tradition provides a plausible explanation as to why it remained unknown to the general public for a long time, but soon after the film was released (especially in Internet forums) many voices were heard that unite behind the film and thus the joke the directors sensed a sophisticated hoax . However, various "testimonies" support the portrayal in the film, the British comedian Barry Cryer told the Guardian in 2005 that he had known the joke for 50 years, albeit not as The Aristocrats , but as The Debonairs or The Sophisticates . The film critic Roger Ebert also ruled out in his answer to a reader question on this subject that the film was a fraud. Ebert also got in touch with Jilette, who assured him that The Aristocrats was an ongoing project, so he intended to interview many more comedians in front of the camera about The Aristocrats in order to preserve this cultural asset for posterity.

Steve Erickson sees The Aristocrats as an example of a fundamental change in the subject of humor: the classic joke is becoming increasingly obsolete, and as comedians from Lenny Bruce to Jerry Seinfeld have shown, a new, more dynamic form of humor has emerged, especially from the personality and performance of the actor lives. Jilette also compares this modern quality of The Aristocrats with the improvisations with which Miles Davis sought to expand the formal corset of jazz around 1950. The author Louis R. Franzini characterizes The Aristocrats as a “ postmodern anti- joke ”, similarly to Stuart Moulthrop : According to him, it is crucial on the one hand that The Aristocrats is not particularly funny, on the other hand the joke says something profound about the entertainment industry that he is comes from: Like a “ black hole ” contaminated language, he condenses all the ironies that characterize today's media into an ultimate “central anomaly.” Meanwhile, Jim Lewis refers to the parallels to a much older, folkloric well-documented phenomenon of African-American customs, the so-called ' Dozens ', where you have to outdo yourself in a competition with insults that are as shocking and absurd as possible.

theory and practice

Gilbert Gottfried, 2007

In the film, many comedians also comment on the humor theory aspect of The Aristocrats in particular and breaking taboos in general. Since then, the functionality of this joke has also been discussed in some works in the relevant specialist literature. Often his comedy with psychoanalytic humor theory of Sigmund Freud ( Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious , 1905) explains, according to similar Komische like a dream to the unconscious repressed psychological fears, desires and tensions "discharged" by social and moral Otherwise constraints remain unspoken. In particular, the constraints of cleanliness and the incest taboo, which, according to Freud's theory of psychosexual development, shape the anal and phallic or oedipal phase of the child, are deliberately broken in The Aristocrats - Joyce Rosenberg notes in her psychoanalytically influenced review of the film that one can literally see from the discomfort of many of the interviewed comedians how the superego defends itself against it.

The fear- and tension-relieving potential of the joke is illustrated by an episode also shown in the film, which the cultural scientist Jeffrey Melnick takes up in a monograph on the process of "coping with" the traumatizing terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 : Barely three weeks after the attacks, the comedian Gilbert did it Gottfried joke about the attacks at a banquet in honor of Hugh Hefner in New York. The audience reacted piqued and even indignant to this lack of taste, boos could be heard, some spectators shouted too soon! ("too early!"). To this damp squib iron out and the evening to "save," grabbed Gottfried presence of mind to a last resort in his profession and offered a particularly brutish version of The Aristocrats is that the entire hall again by a cathartic was echoing laughter. At that time, "9/11" was still too powerful a taboo to be violated, but in this case The Aristocrats helped to break the tension caused by the experience of the attacks by breaking other taboos. The film also illustrates that four years later it was already possible to make jokes about “9/11”: in a sequence of the cartoon series South Park produced especially for the film, the character Cartman tells a story of a disrespect to the victims of the attacks, to say the least Version of The Aristocrats .

The decision of the cinema chain AMC Theaters not to show the documentary in their houses suggests that The Aristocrats are only partially suitable for a public performance or recording even today . AMC justified this with purely economic motives, but it was often speculated in the press that the operators rather saw morality in danger, and that the decision therefore represented a case of censorship . Sarah Silverman also made headlines, in her improvisation, also shown in the film, who made the entertainer Joe Franklin the protagonist of the joke and who most recently even claimed to have been raped by Franklin herself. Franklin then temporarily considered suing Silverman for defamation.

See also

literature

  • Danielle Jeanine Deveau: The Aristocrats! Comedy, Grotesqueries and Political Inversions of the Masculine Code . In: Humor 25: 4,2012. Pp. 401-415. doi : 10.1515 / humor-2012-0020
  • Joyce Rosenberg: The Aristocrats . In: The Psychoanalytic Review 97: 4, 2010. pp. 695-700. doi : 10.1521 / prev.2010.97.4.695

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Louis R. Franzini: Just Kidding: Using Humor Effectively . Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD 2011. p. 66.
  2. ↑ Stuart Moulthrop: Watchmen Meets The Aristocrats . In: Postmodern Culture 19: 1, 2008. doi : 10.1353 / pmc.0.0041
  3. ^ Gershon Legman: Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor . 2nd Edition. Breaking Point, New York 1975. p. 987.
  4. ↑ Elliott Oring: The Aristocrats . In: Journal of American Folklore 120: 478, 2007. pp. 500-501. doi : 10.1353 / jaf.2007.0064
  5. ^ A b Roger Ebert: Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2007 . Andrews McMeel Publishing, Kansas City MS 2006, pp. 889-890.
  6. ↑ Quoted in: Brian Logan: The Verdict . In: The Guardian (online edition), September 2, 2005.
  7. ↑ Steve Erickson: Beyond the Pale . In: Los Angeles Magazine 50: 6, June 2005. pp. 116-117.
  8. ^ 'First, the joke is not especially funny. Second, it says something profound about the entertainment industry and the culture in which it operates. The Aristocrats joke is the black hole rendered into language, a limitless accretor of charged expression. It is the very emblem of the process that spirals in from the funny papers, to the comics houses, to the movie studios, ultimately reaching the central anomaly, an infinite concentration of transnational capital. ' Stuart Moulthrop: Watchmen Meets The Aristocrats . In: Postmodern Culture 19: 1, 2008. doi : 10.1353 / pmc.0.0041
  9. ↑ Jim Lewis: The Aristocrats: What's Funny about one Joke Told Over and Over . In: Slate , July 29, 2005.
  10. ^ Eddie Tafoya: The Legacy of the Wisecrack: Stand-Up Comedy As the Great American Literary Form . Brown Walker Press, Boca Raton FL 2009. p. 73; Joyce Rosenberg: The Aristocrats , p. 697ff.
  11. ^ Joyce Rosenberg: The Aristocrats , p. 696.
  12. ↑ Jeffrey Melnick: 9/11 Culture . John Wiley & Sons, Chichester 2009. p. 19.
  13. ↑ Jeffrey Melnick: 9/11 Culture . John Wiley & Sons, Chichester 2009. p. 20.
  14. ↑ Mark Caro: AMC Theater Patrons Won't be Getting Joke . In: Chicago Tribune (online edition), July 14, 2005.
  15. ↑ Dana Goodyear: Quiet Depravity: The Demure Outrages of a Standup Comic . In: The New Yorker (online edition), October 24, 2005.