Comics tell each other the rudest - and most secret - joke in the world after the audience has left

So, "The Aristocrats" is apparently the rudest joke in the world. Not only is it the dirtiest, but it is also the most secretive, the equivalent from the days of vaudeville of a Masonic handshake between comedians. It's the joke that comics tell one another when the audience has gone home. It was always dirty, but it has become ever ruder, delineating our "danger zones" of humour. Basically, it used to be about the f-word and the s-word. Now that we are all at home, as it were, with adult sex and poo, the joke has had a "giddy shift towards incest".

How far can this joke go? Pretty far, by all accounts. In an eponymous 90-minute documentary, comics including Robin Williams, Billy Connolly, Eddie Izzard and Eric Idle (who confesses rather delightfully that he can't tell a single joke), plus a whole bunch of Americans, espouse their respect for The Aristocrats. They all try to tell the joke. Some do it better than others. Some stick to funny-dirty. Some go for disgusting-dirty. One (Gilbert Gottfried) is so relentlessly shocking that the raucous preview audience when I saw it was silenced.

Not many stand-ups rely on straightforward jokes these days anyway. As someone comments, "How many people do jokes on stage? It's the kiss of death." Yet this has been declared the perfect joke. Why? It's easy to tell. It has a clear set-up. A man, or three men, or an entire family, walk into a talent agent's office and announce they have the perfect act. The act is described. There's a one-word punchline. That's it.

But it has no boundaries. The teller is expected to extemporise, filling in the middle of the joke with the most disgusting details he or she can dream up. Having seen the film, my appreciation of what can be done with diarrhoea has been enhanced a thousandfold. I have also found out what a "rusty trombone" is, and I'm not going to forget that in a hurry. Nor will you, dear reader, should you brave a screening.

But is The Aristocrats a good joke? One or two people complain that they don't get it, but as they include one of the dorks from South Park, this notion isn't given much credence. Yet, after an hour and a half of analysis, it is hard to continue to find it side-splitting, although the depictions of what happens when you screw up are delicious, ranging from what happens if you forget the punchline, give the punchline too early, or, heaven forfend, muddle up the "famous since vaudeville" title with that Disney children's classic, The Aristocats. Billy Connolly, laughing his head off, tells us he likes to vary it with The Sophistocrats. Everyone laughs about how Americans don't really have aristocrats. Connolly laughs again. He laughs throughout anyway.

Perhaps as a justification for a somewhat self-indulgent flip through the comedy contacts book ("Look! We know Robin Williams"), the joke is

described as a social mirror, and perhapsit is. Someone says that the routine, with its incest, vomit, buckets of sperm, and so on, would be the perfect pitch for a TV reality show. Which is quite acute, once you factor in Rebecca Loos and her pig-pleasuring on The Farm.

One thing: The Aristocrats opens in September, and if you are keen on a 90-minute analysis of the rudest joke in the world, please don't get your booking muddled up with Brian Friel's play of nearly the same name, currently playing at the National Theatre.

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