SO, I haven't been to the movies in ages, so yesterday I decided to do a day at the movies. In other words, being in NYC where there is no such thing as a matinee and you can't go for cheaper than $10, I went to a big stadium theatre, paid for one and stayed all day ultimately sneaking into four.

One of these was The Aristocrats. For anyone not familiar, it's a documentary made my Penn Gillette (of Penn & Teller) about the history and sociology of a well known joke on the comedy circuit called "The Aristrocrats."

The documentary featured about 100 comics telling stories about how they first heard the joke, telling the joke, and telling why the joke is significant to them. In theory, the joke is this boundary breaking, taboo busting legend among comics that started on the vaudeville stage and is still around today, morphing to fit whatever is going on.

The framework of the joke goes like this...

A man walks into a talent agent's office. He says he has this great amazing act that he knows the guy will like. The agent says 'tell me about it.' The man says well, my wife and I come out on stage, we both drop our pants, shit on the stage and roll around in it. The agent says "what do you call an act like that?" The man says..."The Aristocrats."

Comics love the joke because it's all about improvisation. From the time the agent says "Tell me about the act" to the end punchline of "The Aristocrats" they get to improv what was happening in the act. The deal is the point is to make it as vulgar, desparing, offensive, and horrific as possible and then have the irony of "The Aristocrats."

The thing I really hated was that the bulk of the comics interviewed were men, everyone from Bob Saget to Jason Alexander to Robin Williams to Tim Conway. All of them told the joke the same. The man comes out on stage with his family. He tells his wife to lay down, he drops his pants and shits in her mouth. He rolls her over and does her in the ass. He calls out his 9 year old son and 7 year old daughter. He puts his big drippy cock in his daughter's mouth while his son does her up the ass. They switch around, so the son is doing the mother, he's doing the daughter up the ass and then they're all shitting on each other and rolling around in shit and cum and on and on and... The Aristocrats!

Spare me. I was watching the audience, because I didn't particularly find anything about the film funny. I looked around and the men in the audience where falling out of their chairs laughing, and some of the women were also laughing but not very many. I found the whole thing disturbing.

Yes, the joke was about breaking taboos. But vulgarity for vulgarity's sake isn't progressive, it's just vulgarity. Inapropriateness doesn't automatically qualify something as revolutionary. All of the incarnations of retelling in the film reflected that age old paradigm of the man standing tall while his wife/family (literally) grovel at his feet. Or, in this case, exist just to be used as a bunch of holes for his big kingly cock to go in. I thought it was one hours and forty minutes of a flimsy excuse for men to spread their nasty fantasies and not get nailed for them.

When as a society are we going to get beyond this baseline objectification of women? Or finding humor in incest and sexual abuse?

I hate misogyny.

Oh, and a few afterthoughts.

After I saw it, I was talking in the lobby to a woman waiting to see the film. She asked me if I liked it, I said no. The first thing out of her mouth was "Oh, are you a born again Christian or something?"

That made me feel great. Am I a right winger and I just don't know it? Somebody, please, if this is the first step towards going there just shoot me. Shoot me now.

Also, I should say in name of fairness that there were women in the documentary, a few, and their versions of the joke were slightly different, in that the wife in the family was the dominant figure controlling the action, and the men were more often being used and serviced. Also, some incarnations of the joke took on politics and not just sex and shit - satirizing racism, 9/11, and other more current hot topics. Those were edgy, funny, and made more sense. But they were also maybe 6% of the makeup of the film. Grumble. Grumble.

¶ 11:39 AM