The Aristocrats

There's a joke which apparently has mainly been told among comedians. A typical version goes like this: A group walks into a talent agent's office. It consists of a father, a mother, a teenage daughter, and a sub-teen boy, plus a small dog. There are variations on the group in different tellings but the father and mother tend to remain stable. Sometimes it's two daughters. Sometimes the dog is a horse. Sometimes one or two grandparents are added into the mix.

The father says to the agent, "We'd like you to represent us," to which the agent replies "Tell me about your act." The father says, "Well, we're a family act." The agent stops him and says, "I don't handle family acts." "But we're a very unusual act," says the father. "Okay," says the agent, "tell me about it" (or sometimes, "show me").

At this point either the father either describes the act or the family demonstrates the act. What's funny about this joke are two things: the act itself is totally and outrageously repulsive in every conceivable way, which may involve sexual perversions (running from shit eating to bestiality), sexual fetishes, torture, violence, with even murder mixed in, along with other audience offenders including ethnic slurs and racism.

Then, once the description or act done, the agent says "That's interesting. What do you call your act?" Here is where the second humorous point comes in: The father then dramatically and haughtily says "The Aristocrats!"

You may have heard buzz or have expectations from previews that this movie is 70 or 80 comedians and/or actors retelling the joke. Not true. The classic joke itself is told all the way through only several times. Most of the movie involves the huge cast of comedians and actors commenting on the joke, telling particularly juicy variations on the "act," musing on how to tell the joke most effectively, and so on. So, don't expect to be laying in the theater aisle breathless throughout the whole movie, though it does have its moments of hilarity. Often, people on the screen are laughing when the audience is not.

There are times when almost all the women in the audience are laughing and the men are not, and vice versa.

One thing this movie (and the joke) does, then, is to help everyone in the audience analyze their own values regarding what is appropriate to laugh at, where good taste lapses into bad taste, and what one's tolerance is for offensive and "gross" humor.