Running as Root

The Aristocrats - 3 out of 5 stars

This is a documentary by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette. The subject matter centers around a joke that has a beginning and an end but no real middle. The middle of the joke is improvised by the teller and the goal is to make it the most shocking and offensive joke you possibly can. I'm a huge fan of Penn Jillette's radio show as I've mentioned before, so I typically enjoy anything with which he's involved. I like this movie a decent amount but it falls just short of greatness.

The main drawback of the movie is twofold. The first is that many of the comedians retelling the joke approached it in pretty much the same way. After hearing 10 or so variations of "piss and shit everywhere" along with combinations of incestuous pedophilic anal sex you long for something more. The second problem is that it has gotten much more difficult to shock people. As such, I didn't find most of the material shocking or disgusting (although my wife certainly did).

I still enjoyed the movie as a documentary. Hearing stories from entertainment industry insiders was fairly interesting. In addition, the DVD extras (especially the "other jokes" section) were very entertaining. It's always fascinating to me to hear analysis of why something is funny. I'd definitely recommend renting it, though it's not for the faint of heart.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 1st, 2006 at 1:55 am and is filed under Entertainment, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.