The Aristocrats

I see most movies long after everyone else does. Last night The Aristocrats came up on one of the movie channels; I’d been meaning to see it for some time now, but an indie documentary about the world’s dirtiest joke isn’t the sort of movie that ends up at the O’Brien Theatre or at the local video store, and it seemed a little too slight to buy — I didn’t necessarily want to own it, but I wanted to see it. So I was glad of the opportunity. My impression? A low-budget film showing comedians dissecting the joke’s format. Dull in places, hilarious in others. My major disappointment was that they did not show Gilbert Gottfried’s 2001 Friar’s Club performance of it — a performance now considered the definitive version — in its entirety: what I saw of him left me gasping.