The lesson of 'The Aristocrats': The joke is all in the telling

Didja hear the one about the comedians who deconstruct the dirtiest joke ever told?

The ultimate one-joke movie, The Aristocrats takes its title from the punch line of a gag that has made its listeners gag and gasp (and chortle and snicker, but mostly gag and gasp) since the days of vaudeville.

The joke is stand-up comedy's "secret handshake," says one of the 100-plus American comics who play variations on the joke's scatological themes with the brio that John Coltrane brought to his riff on Richard Rodgers' "My Favorite Things."

Difference being is that what's inventoried in The Aristocrats is hardly of the raindrops-on-roses, whiskers-on-kittens ilk. It's an obscene litany of poop-on-perversion and bestiality-on-humanity as told, dissected and retold by Drew Carey, George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg and others, and captured on film by comedian-turned-ethnologist Paul Provenza.

So help me, I laughed myself blue. Not at the blue humor, but at the subtle differences in delivery convincing me that humor is not in the message but the messenger. To translate this into deconstructionese: Form is content.

Carey punches his punch line with a flamenco flourish, Carlin muses amusingly on its inherent unfunniness, and Whoopi e-long-ates hers to the point of absurdity.

In Bob Saget's version, the humor comes from the disparity between the filthiness of the joke and the well-scrubbed persona of the teller. Sarah Silverman caps the inside-showbiz joke with a startling showbiz character assassination. And when a mime performs a panto of this joke's unspeakable acts, it demonstrates the joke's endless adaptability.

Though a fine specimen of cultural anthropology, The Aristocrats is too shapeless to be satisfying as a film.

The film makes most of its points within the first 30 minutes. After this, it becomes manifestly clear that the recitation of this nasty joke is endlessly fascinating for white male comics, who probe it as Roto-Rooter plumbs wastepipe. African American and female jokesters tend to shrug off the joke or, like Silverman and Goldberg, subvert it.

Phyllis Diller confesses that the first time she heard it, she fainted. I confess that many of the versions heard here had me hyperventilating with something closer to horror than to laughter.

The only possible defense of the documentary's running time is that it needs its 89-minute length to conform to the classical rhythms of the joke, like a fugue in structure, with successive voices in counterpoint.

To this fugue that might very well induce fugue state, Gilbert Gottfried provides the coda. It was Gottfried's rendition of "The Aristocrats" at a Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner back in 2001 (a few weeks after 9/11, and seen in this film) that made America laugh again, in the words of those who were there.

Normally, I'd rather have my fingernails removed one by one than hear Gottfried, grating and shrill, fray my last nerve. But I have to admit he is brilliant here. And I have to add: We get the joke!

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey

at 215-854-5402 or crickey@phillynews.com.

The Aristocrats

** 1/2 (out of four stars)

Produced by Peter Adam Golden, directed by Paul Provenza, music by Gary Stockdale, distributed by Thinkfilm.

Running time: 1 hour, 29 mins.

Himself. . . Drew Carey

Herself. . . Carrie Fisher

Herself. . . Whoopi Goldberg

Himself. . . Chris Rock

Himself. . . Bob Saget

Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (obscene dialogue)

Playing at: Ritz East