This film, by Paul Provenza and Penn Gilette, opens tomorrow in New York, and a few weeks later in select cities. Can someone go see it and report? Fat chance it ever comes to Charleston, but if anyone thinks it’s worth the 90 minute drive, I can see it when it opens in Columbia on (believe it or not) September 9.
I think Mauer first mentioned this documentary in a comment a few posts back. I first heard about it when I read this piece by Frank Rich:
I do hope to see it sometime in the next week, but it’ll depend where it’s playing. As usual, Pasadena is a much better place to see smaller films than anywhere in LA.
Surprisingly, this is getting quite a lot of mainstream media attention. Not sure why: Perhaps not enough sharks eating children in Florida and too many dud bombs in old blighty.
Speaking of blighty, will also try to post on some Alan Clarke films soon: He’s the anti-Mike Leigh, he is.
ah diane, we appreciate the flattery, but it doesn’t make the spam go down any easier. actually, it does–but i’m going to nuke your post anyway.
I’m confused. Is there a Diane somewhere out there?
Spam is commercial garbish that is automatically sent to hundreds of blogs at the same time regardless of the subject of your posting, but one comment from one of your readers and a link to a place where they can buy “The Aristocrats” T-shirt falls perfectly within the range of acceptable commentary. It is your blog and you can do as you please but don’t call me a spammer ’cause you be wrong and I hate spammers too. I ain’t coming back here to hear your response so be more careful the next time ’cause as far as I can see, no one else is reading your pretentious non-sense.
I’ve been told that this blog approaches to genius
Have you got any Ingmar Bergman t-shirts?
I THOUGHT NO ONE ELSE WAS READING THIS! NOW EVERYONE CAN FIND MY PRETENTIOUS NONSENSE! IT WAS JUST SUPPOSED TO BE FOR MY FRIENDS!!!!!
Non-sense, you mean?
Who’s “Nikki”? If she’s not selling t-shirts, I ain’t going to read her garbish.
I got a t-shirt for you, Reynolds.
mmmmn . . . garbish
i hurt diane’s feelings–i feel so bad. note to other potential advertisers in our vast readership: if you want to flog a product in a comment, and you don’t disclose your relationship with said commercial activity, then you’re a spammer. and we don’t like spam here, unless it is between two slices of wonderbread with a lot of tabasco.
Thank you, Arnab. I’m glad this issue has been clarified and we can move on. Frankly, the whole episode gave me heartburn. Thank goodness I have Mylanta in my medicine cabinet. Comforting relief that starts on contact, and it’s now available in fast-acting, easy-to-swallow softgels.
Mmm, mmm, Mylanta
how are you able to create a hyperlink in a feedback post?
So, these two academics wander into a documentary, planning to post something acutely intelligent about the film’s examination (and performance) of comedy to a weblog of chattering nabobs.
“What do you think we ought to say,” asked Jeff, as sat down in the seat and carefully removed his khaki shorts and leopard-print briefs, rubbing himself quickly to a state of semi-arousal so that he could stick it into a hole cut into the underside of his medium-sized box of popcorn.
Mike replied, “More to the point, does that have butter flavoring on it?”
“It will soon,” said Jeff, with an innocent chuckle. Mike hated him at that moment, and imagined a naked sweaty Mickey Rourke beating the shit out of Jeff for stealing his ‘prop’/priap-corn shtick from “Diner”. He imagined Jeff’s erection snuggled comfortably between the kernels. He imagined a voracious popcorn-loving wolverine running up from under the seats to rip into the box, casually dismembering Jeff while tearing great swathes out of the box’s contents, and Jeff–hereafter known as Stubby–squirting blood onto the couple in front of him, both of whom turned with leers on their faces and began moving fingers in and out of Stubby’s stub, murmuring to themselves about little Dutch boys and dikes while rubbing with their free hands at one another’s crotches.
“Sssh,” Mike said. “The movie’s about to start.” What followed was yes a bit predictable. Lots of shit-eating, golden-showering, genital-to-genital contact, genital-to-oral contact, genital-to-anal contact, genital-to-grievous-wound contact; an intriguing undercurrent of racial tension surfaced somewhere about midway, ‘though the participants didn’t fully examine or interrogate the intersections of all this bodily efflorescence in terms of social identities. Then Mike came all over Jeff’s smug beatific face, while casually munching popcorn and occasionally yelling an orgasmic “Bakhtin” or “Got your Freud here,” hoping like hell all the while not to touch Jeff’s misshapen member or even to grab a stray hair along with his handfuls of week-old salty snacks, because Mike has a delicate sensibility. And the trailers ended, so they stopped their fucking to watch the movie, curious whether they’d have anything smart to say for the ‘blog.
Mike, did you post that comment on purpose?
I’m trying to pad my c.v., for annual reviews. This counts as peer-review, doesn’t it?
Mike — so, did you like ‘The Aristocrats’? Did it seem to work?
Yeah, I liked it–on a couple levels. First, foremost, I laughed a lot, and often surprisingly. We walked out debating who amused us most, and it went beyond the folks who have been getting press: Sarah Silverman is fantastic (and her new movie, Jesus is Magic looks fantastic, too), so is Saget, but a couple others snuck up on us–a perverse ventriloquist, Taylor Negron (!), and Eddie Izzard wandering away in his inimitable fashion from the joke. Oh, and Kevin Pollak doing Christopher Walken telling the joke. Larry Storch, for crying out loud! Martin Mull and Fred Willard, who …. well, damn, I wish Fernwood 2-Nite was still on. Once you start naming names, you kind of get lost in a reverie–many people are very funny, in very distinct ways.
(Plus it was just surprising to see some of the folks who popped in–Chuck McCann, Dave Thomas, Rip Taylor! I won’t spoil the surprise at the end, either.)
I was surprised that it kept surprising, that it never dragged or wore out its welcome. But Provenza and Jillette know how to structure a joke, so their ability to shape the whole film effectively for pacing and momentum should not have been so startling. It’s solid entertainment. (Okay, maybe I did find Paul Reiser and Drew Carey kind of dull.)
I also think it’s smart–but as my little note implies, the movie suggests more than offers up analyses, particularly about race. There’s a brief tantalizing dismissal by Chris Rock and a great short riff by Lisa L-something, but then that all sneaks back into subtext. You could probably also wander through the fields of the American id for some time, trying to figure out how and why these permutations signify. But the movie isn’t really aiming to explain as much as enact such possibilities, and I think it does so fantastically.
Plus it’s funny. And Jeff is one hell of a lay.
Someday soon, when anyone enters “Mike Reynolds” into Google,the first link will go right to that comment.
Frankly, you’ve just out-bad tasted my own blog, which impresses me to no end.
I want to try to see Aristocrats this weekend, but i’m beginning to think I’ll wait for DVD on it. Also want to see Broken Flowers, 40 year old virgin (getting very good reviews), Grizzly Man, and Devil’s Rejects, and may go to those instead.
By the way, if anyone is intrigued by Asylum, but knows they probably won’t see it, I recommend Netflixing Spider. Same author – better director and cast. Cronenberg at his calmest, Ralph Fiennes at his quietest. In fact, it’s the calmest, quietest creepy movie I’ve seen.
Well, now when you google “Mike Reynolds,” you get a Bassmaster Angler, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma, and the guy from California who created the three-strikes law. So… I am not too worried about my already-enfeebled reputation.
I second the recommendation for Spider. And for boinking Jeff.
We’re going to see Virgin momentarily…
I’m not surprised Mike liked Bob Saget.
I was surprised how much I liked it. I think I went mostly to be shocked (and “March of the Penguins” was sold out), but it was a real pleasure to hear comedians and writers talking so intelligently about their craft, and just evidently having so much fun with the joke. In that respect, it echoed why “Original Kings of Comedy” worked so well, while “Blue Collar Kings of Comedy” did not — or maybe I just don’t like redneck jokes.
Also its versatility: the guy with the card trick version and the mime were hilarious.
I heard an interview with Jillette where he said that Carlin got him to promise to limit Robin Williams’ time onscreen. Not only was that wise, but were Provenza and Jillette trying to get a dig at Williams by using a split-screen to show that his version and Drew Carey’s were identical?
Anyway, anything that is smart, funny, and makes the religious right foam at the mouth is worth seeing.
“I heard an interview with Jillette where he said that Carlin got him to promise to limit Robin Williams’ time onscreen.”
That’s not exactly what I heard, though Jillette may have said so in other interviews. This is what I read:
“He made us promise that we would not take a penny from anyone or any advice from anyone until the final edit was done, and that that would not change. We promised George that because we didn’t want anybody saying, ‘You know, this is great boys. We’ll give you the money but we need a little more Robin Williams, a little less Gilbert [Gottfried], okay?’ George has been around enough to know that once you’ve got anybody else involved, there would be that kind of stuff. So there was no input whatsoever in the movie except me and [Paul] Provenza.”
This is from an interview with Fred Topel that appeared in About.com
I also heard it a little differently:
I heard that Carlin called Robin Williams an unfunny hack – a coke fiend with an infantilism complex who got lucky playing a retard in the 70s and has milked the same bit every day since then.
Oh yeah – and fuck Whoopi Goldberg.
Are you sure it wasn’t Bob Saget who said that?
I heard it on “Studio 360” (speaking of pretentious wankers), and it was supposedly Carlin speaking, but I can’t vouch for the precise quote.
I will neither confirm nor deny rumors concerning the gnawing of my gentalic magnificence, though I will acknowlege that Mike is a generous and compassionate cocksucking, ass-tickling sophisticate. And I do indeed agree with all of my friend’s repsonses above. Still, I’ll play devil’s advocate. First, since we like to watch, I’ll note that this is truly an ugly movie to look at and it’s piss poor editing made me dizzy. No one in the film seems to know what to do in front of the camera (or behind for that matter) with the exception of Sarah Silverman and Penn and Teller. Just watch the way Teller moves in and out of the frame, wryly punctuating the duo’s take on the joke. It was an oasis of creative thinking, and smart camera set ups, in a very bland visual work. I’m also interested in how the film works very dilligently to tame and contain the obscene utterances it wants to celebrate as subversive. The film never, ever felt dangerous to me just sophomoric (accept when Silverman took the joke in a very uncomfortable direction). Mostly we have a bunch of white guys and a few white gals (with two black performers for good measure–Goldberg’s joke going over most Americans’ heads since foreskin is an alien concept over here–and a black homeless man who was the butt of one of the joksters, which was slightly problematic). And I would probably add that most of these white folks were Jewish. I don’t know what to make of that, but what I was watching (while laughing my ass off) was a sort of insiders club of Hollywood’s elite comics riffing on an historically risque joke that, one imagines, has kept them howling in the back rooms of the bortsch belt circuit for the last 80 or 90 years. But even this sense of the illusion of community (the new guard celebrating the old guard) is little more than the suturing of a bunch of isolated interviews passing itself off as a cohesive collective representation. Though I might have walked away from the film feeling a bit envious that all of these guys work so closely with each other (weekend barbecuing when not attdending Bel Air bat mitzvahs)–I fear that that is simply an illusion maintained by cinematic suturing. Finally, everyone seemed to be really pleased with themselves so sociological analysis was thrown out of the window from day one. Mike’s post on obscenity is actually too smart of a question for this film. Still, Eddie Izzard is fantastic, the card player, the mime, the person who told the joke about the three black women: one playing the violin, one reading Shakespearean sonnets, and another painting a moderninst masterpiece–the title of that family act has been outed elsewhere on this site, but that joke made me squirm in ways that this boy’s club narrative didn’t know what to do with. One final spoiler. Tim Conway is the surprise ending and he sucks (but, thankfully, there’s not a golf ball in sight).
Take that, Diane!
After seeing this, I was actually wondering how one of my favorite comedians – Bob Newhart – woud tell the joke. Newhart doesn’t work blue though, and frankly I didn’t give it much more than a passing thought.
Someone on McSweeney’s website however, did.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2005/9/8wells.html
Not only that, it’s funny. It made me laugh at loud even. She’s got Newhart down.
I saw Newhart perform years ago – the year after “Newhart” went off the air (the Vermont Inn series). He did some old stuff, showed some photos of him and Rickels and their wives travelling, told stories about the tv shows… It was great.
Jesus, Mark. You like Newhart, too? Don’t get me (or Frisoli) started! Love him doing his famous phone routine in “Hell is for Heroes.”
“Oh the…the vichyssoise…it…it is cold soup.”
That’ll fool those Germans.
goddamnit–i was waiting for the jet-lag to clear before going to see this in the theater and now it isn’t playing in boulder any more. do i need to drive to denver to see it or will i survive till dvd?
I’m sure there will be plenty of extra stuff on the DVD to make it worth watching there. I’d wait.
This, an article about Sarah Silverman in the New Yorker is, of course, very funny.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051024fa_fact
Her on the Jews killed Christ bit: “I did it. My family. . . . Not only did we kill Christ, we’re going to kill him when he comes backâ€
“Everybody blames the Jews for killing Christ,†Silverman says. “And then the Jews try to pass it off on the Romans. I’m one of the few people that believe it was the blacks.â€
“I was raped by a doctor,†she says. “Which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.â€
Sweetly, Joe Franklin is thinking of suing Sarah for her Aristocrats joke. That, in itself, makes her the best teller of the joke in the film by a mile.
silverman is funny, but perhaps because i am an insensitive, offensive bastard to begin with i have a low tolerance for people whose acts are premised essentially on saying outrageous things about sex and race. i remember going to some comedy show in l.a years and years ago–some long-time club was about to close down or something like that and all these hip l.a comedians had come out to do a freebie. many of them were funny, but it was all so :”hipsters for hipsters”. something about that vibe turns me off.
also, you’d think osmosis or something would make kimmel a little funnier. what’s up with that?
Hey Mark-
The bit she does on the Jews-Killing-Christ actually starts with “Everybody blames…” The earlier stuff about family, and killing him upon his return, is Lenny Bruce.
I tend to agree with you, Arnab, about dismissing the easily provocative. But Silverman can really write; her jokes are not just models of provocation, they are models of precise misdirection and savagery. The trailer for her Jesus is Magic is already one of the funniest things I’ve seen at the movies all year, so… I’m keen to see it.
And Kimmel, yeah. I always thought he was funniest in strange, passing moments, asides he’d mutter when the focus was elsewhere. Before he hit it not-so-big (when he was merely not-big-at-all), he did these weird promo bits for Fox, and they were often very funny. But now, feh. His punchlines and approach/persona go for the frat boys rather than at them.
Osmosis. Is that what they’re calling it these days?
this isn’t really aimed at silverman–but my distaste is not simply for simple provocateurs. the hipster comic vibe that annoys me is slightly different: as i’ve seen it play out in l.a it is hip folks making ironic jokes about racism and homophobia (usually) to an audience that is already hip to the un-coolness of ever saying things like that unironically–(white) post-racist comedians making post-racist jokes for (white) post-racists, and no one really very uncomfortable. perhaps someone like silverman pushes even such an audience past their comfort level–i don’t know enough about her to be able to say (though some of that stuff in the new yorker is very good).
yes, osmosis. of course, you need a partially-permeable membrane. and you of all people, mike, should know that i have one.
finally watched the aristocrats last night. i thought it was consistently funny but nothing great. the mime was my favourite. the revelation was discovering that some of the funniest tellings were by people i don’t usually consider funny.
can’t decide whether to watch the extras, which seem to consist entirely of the unedited, complete tellings of the jokes by some of the comedians.
okay, so i watched the extras. if you liked the film i recommend you rent the dvd and watch the extras. some of the complete joke tellings are utterly boring (whoopi goldberg, in particular–it appears she asked to be in the film) but some are better than anything in the film itself. there’s more of silverman, for example, but the best is kevin pollak doing the joke as albert brooks (in the film he does it as christopher walken). it is an uncanny habitation of the persona (he calls it possession) and at the end he remarks frankly that whenever he does brooks he can hear himself and he thinks to himself, “why can’t i be as funny as myself as i am when i do brooks?”. this gets to the attraction of the joke itself: that despite having a rigorous structure it liberates the teller from form–you might unkindly say that it liberates someone like pollak from his own comedian persona. the extended versions of saget and azaria’s jokes are also great, as is the one by jason alexander and his friend. in all these cases we actually see what the film only tells us about the joke: that it is about its own construction (and sometimes deconstruction)
speaking of brooks I am very eager to see “Looking for comedy in the Moslem World” for the ways it will contribute to this thread on possibly dangerous comedy. it will also test my premise that Jewish shtick is inherently anti-authoritarian.
simon and i saw this film a couple of nights ago. well, we didn’t exactly see it, because at some point, say 15 mins into it, our friends peter and amie called to see if we wanted to go watch the olympics and we said sure. so we saw 15 mins of it. i told simon it was enough for me. simon said he’d finish it but never did. i don’t think either of us even smiled once (simon just told me he actually chortled a couple of times). here’s a few possibilities:
a) simon and i don’t know enough about american comedians to appreciate the in-joking and all that.
b) simon and i are humorless bastards.
c) simon and i are foreigners and american humor is lost on us.
d) simon and i get bored easily.
e) simon and i are the wrong gender for this film.
f) having grown up in foreign countries, simon and i have made these jokes since adolescence and find them old. hence:
g) simon and i are too cool for this film.
h) all the funny bits are after the first 15 mins.
the best thing about it all is reynolds’ post about jeff’s getting his dick cut off (jeff, did you find out how to do hyperlinks in comments? if not, tell me and i’ll explain). i realize that it is funny because i know reynolds and jeff (though, in the case of jeff, not in person). which brings me to a) above. but i want to make the following observation: while sitting at pete and amie’s watching the olympics, i couldn’t help making a ton of lewd, inappropriate, coprophiliac, obscene jokes. just like mike did. one thing this documentary does, it liberates the filth in you.
a) through g) may be true, for all I know, but the funiest moments are later in the movie: Sarah Silverman, the mime, the card trick, Kevin Pollack channeling Christopher Walken, Bob Saget…
i was not aware that gio’s filth needed much liberation but yes, they are a pair of humourless bastards. gio’s approach to comedy is much like the italian national team’s approach to football: dull and defensive; and simon is a philosopher: he doesn’t understand jokes.
it’s humor, arnab, not humour. you’ve been in the united states for, what, 15 years?
this is my 13th year, but who’s counting?
sorry, you’re a pair of humorless bastards.
it’s “whose” counting, arnab! why, don’t you read students’ paper or other people’s blogs?!? have you missed the great shift in standard american spelling?!? 13 years in the country, and i have to teach you everything.
Does anybody have a take on Michael Richards’ racist rant at a local comedy club in LA. I watched the viral video and it looked to be far less incendiary than the media and blogosphere would have us believe . . . that being said it was certainly provocative (even if I read it as a post-Chappell, post-Aristocrats, post-Borat, post-PC rant). This is something standup always engages in right; how to tame or undermine the heckler. Richards crosses the line, but it seemed performative to me and not malicious (at least not intentionally malicious). That being said, once he found himself in deep water, he walked away. And now, like Mel Gibson before him, he’s apologizing profusely (albeit awkwardly). The rest of the media feeding frenzy on this one is just as interesting (Jesse Jackson today encouraging consumers not to buy the new DVD set of “Seinfeld,” season 7). Any thoughts?
Trolling YouTube it is clear that Richards was simply reprising a scene from the Weird Al Yankovic movie, ‘UHF.’ I’m not sure if that makes it better, worse (or exactly what those terms mean in this context), more performative, or whatever.
That YouTube clip is a great joke, but a joke–you saw that, right Chris? It’s dubbed? My dim recollections of the movie are that his character is actually finding a lizard in his pants at that moment.
But you probably know that. The very hard thing for me here is that history of Richards as provocateur who disrupts the frame of the joke. I recall that “Fridays” show where his “fight” with Andy Kaufman broke up a sketch.
But watching the clips of his comedy rant, I see nothing to cue any kind of performativity or reflexivity. And if it was some more serious gag, you’d think that would be part of the explanation/apology.
I agree that the media frenzy is strange, and generally unreflective. Yet I do see the clip as incendiary. Now, it’d be a lot more interesting if it was a performative fire-starting, but … well, it does just seem like a guy blowing up, trying to turn the audience ‘comically’ against the hecklers but doing so in a way that was more straight aggression than challenge (or invitation) to transgress. The fact that it’s Richards–with that history as a performer–seems more interesting than the (seeming) fact(s) of the performance.
But it’s perhaps an interesting challenge … is there a way to read this as comedy, rather than sermonize? And if we read it as comedy–could, would we get anywhere interesting?
I actually didn’t realize the UHF clip was a joke and dubbed. I’ve never seen it. Pity.