A dirty joke

Paul Provenza's movie "The Aristocrats" hasn't opened in Philly yet, but I'm hoping it comes here soon. It is, of course, a one-joke movie, but I like that joke. And the reviews have been very good.

Well, most of the reviews. Michael Elliott — the guy at "The Christian Critic's Movie Parables" — panned it.

He probably should have. His gig, after all, is monitoring Hollywood movies for content that his audience would find objectionable. His particular audience is made up of fairly conservative evangelical Christians, so there's a lot they find objectionable. But even if he were writing for the Gomorrah Gazette he would probably have to warn his audience about the objectionable content. That's kind of the point. This is, after all, a film that bills itself as offering "No nudity. No violence. Unspeakable obscenity."

It's about a dirty joke. A really, really dirty joke. But it's also a really funny dirty joke. Which is why I can't wait until it opens here.

It's not the kind of joke you can summarize, and it doesn't really work if you just read it, so if you've never heard it (and you have a taste for tastelessness, and you're not at work, and there are no children in the room) you can see a typically filthy version here, as told by the "South Park" character Eric Cartman.* (And seriously, do not click on that link if you're easily offended. Even if you're not at all easily offended, you're going to be offended.)

Here's a bit from the Movie Parables review. It's fascinating because Elliott seems to realize that the joke is funny, yet he doesn't really get it:

A veritable who's who of comedy offers their respective two cents as comic after comic chimes in on the history, composition and personal approach of what may be the world's oldest and least familiar dirty joke. Some favor the colorful descriptive elements of bodily functions while others zero in on deviant sexual behavior. No matter which approach is taken, you can be sure that moral boundaries, if they ever existed in the first place, simply aren't taken into consideration in the telling of the joke. In fact, as more than one comedian notes, the greater they make the degradation, the funnier the joke becomes.

And therein is the problem I have with the film. While no prude, I have developed the habit of considering where the profit may lie in exposing me (and my family) to certain forms of secular entertainment. I cannot subscribe to the philosophy of "anything for a laugh." Scripture asks us to think about what we say and what effect in may have on the listener.

"Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers" Ephesians 4:29 (KJV).

Though the film manages to wrest from us giggles and guffaws, it does so at what cost. Certainly there is nothing edifying about the subject matter. If anything it adds to the deterioration of whatever moral standards remain in our culture. The more we press against the boundaries of decency and morality to the point of spilling over them, the weaker we make our society and damage the moral integrity of the generations to follow.

Elliott says that "moral boundaries … simply aren't taken into consideration in the telling of the joke."

This is nonsense. The joke is all about moral boundaries. It doesn't work without them. If someone tried to tell this joke without taking them into consideration it would fall horribly flat. (This is why I wonder if Howard Stern can succeed in the unregulated ether of satellite radio. I'm not sure his shtick will work without the FCC as a foil and a tether.)

Transgressive jokes like The Aristocrats only work by recognizing the existence and significance of moral boundaries. In doing so, transgressive humor doesn't just acknowledge those boundaries, it actually reaffirms them.

This particular joke usually includes a litany of taboos: incest, necrophilia, cannibalism, bestiality, pedophilia. You pretty much have to include at least four of those five when you tell it. And if you tell it well someone will, inevitably, say, "That's just wrong!" And that, of course, is the point. That's what "taboo" means.

This is part of the function of such jokes. The hysterically uncomfortable person blurting out "That's just wrong!" believes this far more fervently than they would if it were simply a finger-wagging moralist stating this fact to them.

Jokes like this can even serve as a kind of gauge of what it is that we consider sacred. Consider the Cartman version. This rendition manages to work in a reference to 9/11. Cartman says something truly awful about it. If the topic were not deserving of reverence then it wouldn't work in the joke. The humor is perverse, so perverse it's in-verse. Like Topsy-Turvy Day, it's a ribald and irreverent way of honoring the sacred.

While grudgingly acknowledging that the movie (and the joke itself) is funny, Elliott rejects it as unedifying, an example of "the philosophy of 'anything for a laugh.'" That's backwards. Transgressive humor is not about "anything for a laugh." It's about a laugh for anything. A laugh for everything.

This is why there are Nazis in every Mel Brooks movie. And this is why dirty jokes can be "good to the use of edifying."

Despite all of that, Elliott was right to discourage his readers from seeing this movie or, God forbid, taking their kids to it. It drives me crazy when evangelicals treat things like "The Simpsons" or "Unguarded" (the first "secular" Amy Grant album) as though they were unspeakably obscene. In this case, however, such qualms are justified. I think that transgressive humor can be a form of "gaiety transfiguring all this dread," but it's not for everyone.

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* Link via Majikthise, who in this case may not want the credit.