{"id":8997,"date":"2005-08-05T11:53:31","date_gmt":"2005-08-05T16:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/2005\/08\/05\/my-favorite-aristocrats\/"},"modified":"2005-08-05T11:53:31","modified_gmt":"2005-08-05T16:53:31","slug":"my-favorite-aristocrats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2005\/08\/05\/my-favorite-aristocrats\/","title":{"rendered":"My favorite aristocrats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lindsay at Majikthise<\/a> manages a twofer: saying something interesting and insightful about humor and jazz at the same time.<\/p>\n

As you may have heard, The Aristocrats<\/a> is a documentary featuring 100 retellings of the same joke.<\/p>\n

Here are the bare bones: Family asks agent to consider their act, agent says he doesn’t do family acts but agrees to let them demonstrate, [act of unspeakable obscenity, incest is non-negotiable, may also feature scatology, beastiality, emetophilia, etc.], agent says “That’s a hell of an act, what do you call it? Family member answers “The Aristocrats.”<\/p>\n

Honestly, the joke isn’t funny. In fact, that’s probably why it’s a perennial favorite with professional comedians. If you can make this joke funny, you could probably get laughs by reading a tax return.<\/p>\n

The joke is like a lot of jazz standards. Tunes like Autumn Leaves aren’t that interesting until you’ve heard at least 20 different versions. Once you know that a work is a standard, you can step back from the material itself and concentrate on the artist’s interpretation. The movie features The Aristocrats as told by a mime, a magician, a tumbling act, the editorial staff of The Onion, the animated cast of South Park, and a huge variety of standup comics. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s a good way of understanding the enduring popularity of a joke that isn’t inherently very good. The jazz equivalent would be John Coltrane showing off with My Favorite Things<\/a> — you can hear him thinking, “Hell, I can make even this shlock sound good.” Although I am also partial to Patricia Barber’s cover of Light My Fire<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lindsay at Majikthise manages a twofer: saying something interesting and insightful about humor and jazz at the same time. As you may have heard, The Aristocrats is a documentary featuring 100 retellings of the same joke. Here are the bare bones: Family asks agent to consider their act, agent says he doesn’t do family acts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","category-humor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8997\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}