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One of the most telling lines in the documentary The Aristocrats comes from the late comedian George Carlin: “I do like to play with people's danger zones.” The Aristocrats is a film about a dirty joke, an inside joke that comedians tell to entertain each other—and only each other. The joke, in a very abbreviated form, goes like this:
A man goes into a talent agent's office and tells the agent, “I have a family act I want to tell you about.” The agent says, “so go ahead” and the man describes the act: “My wife and I and our children go out on stage and we all have sex with each other and then we shit on the floor and roll around in it.” The agent responds, “Very interesting. What do you call your act?” And the man answers, “The Aristocrats.”
The ninety-minute film includes a series of increasingly graphic permutations of the joke, told by famous comedians and by comedy writers who are not well known to the public, but who are part of the inner circle that gleefully shares the joke. Since they also talk about how they invent and perform their own versions of the joke, the film is about creativity and the craft of writing comedy. We can watch it and admire the process.
For the most part, though, the film is about the taboos that surround incest, shit, and aggression and how much we want to overcome our superegos and break those taboos. As Carlin accurately puts it, the “Aristocrats” joke is about “all the things that cross lines. … Make it as matter of fact as possible. … That's the joy for me … saying something that violates someone's boundaries.”
Comments from other comedians echo the same theme:
“You just want to shock the people.”
“The more grotesque, the better.”