The Filth And The Funny

The Age

Saturday January 28, 2006

Red Symons

You're disgusting, sick, salacious and quite possibly perverted. And you make me laugh, writes Red Symons.

The results of the 43rd annual world's filthiest limerick competition fidgeted out of the printer at Broadcast House.

A junior producer grabbed it as it dropped onto the tray like a dead mackerel and hurried up to the next floor.

The newsreader, seeing the producer in his peripheral vision, beckoned without taking his eyes from the script he was reading, "The family of the climber say they have not yet given up hope". Tip-toeing past the blinking red "on-air" light, the producer opened the door and, as quietly as he could, slid the piece of paper in front of the newsreader. Now reading the weather, the newsreader gave a thumbs up and paused for the mandatory no-more-than-three-seconds in order to rapidly digest and mentally re-edit the information in front of him.

"And finally, on a lighter note, the results of the 43rd annual world's filthiest limerick competition are to hand. Some listeners may be offended by the material so, where there is an inappropriate word, I shall simply replace it with the word 'bleep' Here

is the winning entry:

Bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep

Bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep

Bleep bleep bleep bleep

Bleep bleep bleep bleep

Bleep bleep bleep bleep bleep c---!

First, let me apologise to you, the reader, not for the language, but for dissecting a joke. An unexamined life may not be worth living, but a joke examined is a joke destroyed. It is rendered unfunny.

Briefly, I cannot write the word needed at the end of the limerick in this publication. The proprietor would deem it to be an impropriety. Even if you were to bail me up on the street tomorrow I would look furtively around to see who was in earshot before I launched into the joke.

The gag, of course, is that, if the newsreader has cautiously decided that c---! is the only word that makes it over the line, then what unimaginable filth is contained in the bleeps that precede it. The filth, however, is imaginable. You just did it, in principle at least, and then, perhaps, you laughed.

One of the most inane observations ever made, usually by the youthful, is to talk about a "warped sense of humour". Humour is, inherently, the appreciation of the warp in the mind/space continuum. Filth, a subset of the warp, comes in two basic flavours, the scatological and the sexual, each of which leaves a testing taste in your mouth. If you can think of a third flavour, then shame on you, that's disgusting and congratulations. Some would argue that it is bestiality but I would have thought that it was covered by the first two.

The scatological and sexual have much in common. They are, to a degree, involuntary and their control is a hallmark of a civilised society. Loss of control elicits instant shame. They involve substances that are incorporated as essential to our physical being until the split-second when they become separate. At that moment when they become other, they become objects of shame and self-loathing, evidence of the horror that hides within.

Most of all, they involve great pleasure. A girlfriend once said to me that there is nothing more overestimated than a good f--- and nothing more underestimated than

a good s---. I didn't take it personally. I thought she had a reasonable point.

So here is the great bringing together of matter and anti-matter, desire and revulsion, love and hate, which gives the filthy joke its explosive force.

Every boy learns that the dirty joke is context-sensitive. At its simplest, there is the joke in which the elderly lady with the oddly named lost dog asks, "Have you seen my Titswobble?" This is not a joke that an adult female authority figure is likely to be amused by. According to Freud, a sexual joke told by a man to a woman carries an aggressive sexual advance as its subtext. It says that if you will tolerate this behaviour then there are other barriers between us that I can break down. Curiously, women invariably cite a good sense of humour as a prized asset in a potential partner.

Filthy jokes are secret men's business. It is, primarily, a male activity. A woman telling a filthy joke to a man is destabilising the social order. She is wanton. There are three roles available to women as joke-tellers. There are the transvestites - Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers - who can tell the joke because they're not really women. They're drag queens, notionally. There are the ingenues - Lucille Ball, Rita Rudner - who can tell the joke because they don't really understand it. And then there's the slag - Mae West, Judith Lucy - who can tell the joke because the rules of engagement no longer matter. They're up for anything anyway.

Jokes are the means by which men convey their emotional responses. Permit me a parable, a true story, to illustrate. A friend of mine gave his spare room to a guy for six months while the guy was separated from his wife. Presumably, in the course of those six months, lying among the pizza boxes and discarded cans watching monster trucks on the large-screen TV, there would have been a modicum of conversation. Jokes were probably told. Sometime after this period, when the guy was back with his wife, I asked my friend, "what was the deal" with the guy and his wife. My friend replied, "Dunno mate, never asked."

Women are appalled, incredulous and amused by this. If a woman is struck by emotional turmoil, she will rush straight to the coven to confer. Men, however, will recognise mute stoicism as the proper male behaviour. We don't discuss our emotional state. We air it, in parable, by telling jokes. That parable wasn't a joke, by the way.

Joke telling in mass media is a toothless beast. It is largely about walking up to the line drawn in the sand and putting your toe ever so slightly across it. Kennedy had his crow call, Seinfeld had "shrinkage". Filth is teased at but is never totally embraced. Euphemism itself becomes the joke. Freud's favourite joke was

"A wife is like an umbrella. Sometimes you have to take a cab", a joke so steeped in euphemistic metaphor that its abstruseness alone renders it inoffensive. It's kind of filthy. He's saying adultery is OK.

Howard Stern, the American broadcaster, is conducting a curious experiment. He has abandoned terrestrial radio, which is circumscribed by obscenity laws, for digital satellite radio in which there are no rules, presumably because there is no jurisdiction. In his first day on air, he was free to give vent to a collection of four-letter words, hundreds of times by all accounts, words that had been previously proscribed. I wonder if Stern skirting the boundaries is likely to be more amusing than Stern going over the edge. That's what made the Carry On films work.

But that's mass media, in which we are allowed to only glimpse the vast, dank underbelly. As pornography dwarfs Hollywood, so the filthy joke passed from father, or more appropriately uncle, to son, dwarfs the carefully vetted jokes of prime time.

There is one joke, a filthy joke, the filthiest joke, which because of its nature can never be seen on TV or heard on the radio. This joke is so filthy that it is not even told to audiences in comedy clubs. It is a joke only ever told by comedians to other comedians. The joke is known simply as "The Aristocrats".

I had heard about Paul Provenza's movie The Aristocrats in the same way as I heard the joke in the first place: not through the media but through word of mouth. I was briefly confused because in this country, and in Britain, the joke is told as "The Debonairs". Like the dazzling array of stand-up comics who appear in the movie, the moment I heard about the movie, I thought it was an idea of genius. Get every stand-up you can find to tell the same filthy joke. As Provenza, the producer and director, said, "All the people in the movie are people who said 'yes' right away. If anybody said 'we'll think about it' or was hesitant in any way, we never called back." You either get it straightaway or you never will.

Only a week ago I had run into a friend from New York who had seen the movie, and I excitedly badgered him for more information. Now I had the DVD.

The children were at the other end of the house, so I closed the door to the front room, loaded it and lounged down. My wife briefly came into the room to hunt for something on the internet. After about a minute her attention was drawn to the television. "That's revolting," she said and left the room. Either you get it or you don't.

It was a hot day and I realised that, not only were the windows open, but that my mother-in-law was ritually sweeping the front yard. I closed the windows and then proceeded to watch the movie, riding the volume control for safety - up for the commentary, down for the joke.

The Aristocrats has a premise - a man goes to a talent agent to try to sell his family act - it has a coda, and in between, it has a vast, malleable, arbitrary, torrent of filth. That's the good bit. It's not about arriving; it's about the journey. According to Provenza, it's jazz. "The analogy with jazz was really what started us off on it," he says. "We were talking about how jazz and comedy have so much in common. In jazz it's de rigeur for a jazz artist to take a stab at a standard and do their own interpretation." Musicians play standards and, through the template of the same old tune, find their own expression, improvising around the theme.

In The Aristocrats the basic material is dad, mum, son, the adorable seven-year-old daughter, the family dog, and the joke is whatever the comedian cares to do with them. Your time starts now. According to legend, the record for the middle section, with no repetition, is between half and three-quarters of an hour.

But this is not a movie in which the joke is told over and again. It is a movie that examines structure and improvisation and the transgressive nature of comedy. The writers of satirical website The Onion, in one scene, stand clinically at a whiteboard, ranking offensiveness - first urine, then faeces, then incest, finally bestiality - in exactly the same way that a composition class in a conservatorium might deconstruct the inexorable swell of Ravel's Bolero.

Paul Reiser advises how best to set up the ambush in the premise. Drew Carey suggests how to sell the ending. Bill Maher shows that it's possible to make a variation on the coda. Chris Rock observes that black comedians never had the same taboo-breaking fascination with filthy jokes because they were never going to springboard to TV anyway. It's performed in mime and in close-up card tricks. There's even something for the kids when the South Park drawings do the joke.

Robin Williams, Billy Connolly, Jason Alexander, George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Carrie Fisher, Don Rickles, Steven Wright, Michael McKean, the Smothers Brothers, the Amazing Jonathan - where should I stop?

Provenza advised that the way to watch this movie is to see it with friends. It can be instructive to see which bits they find offensive. He also warned, "If you try this joke around the water cooler at work, it may be actionable."

This is a seriously funny film but you either get it or you don't.

The Aristocrats is now showing.

© 2006 The Age

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