''The Aristocrats" is the two-word punchline to a hoary old joke as vulgar as it is infinitely extendable - less "shaggy dog" than "doggy shag". Bestiality, coprophilia, incest, urolagnia and a tidal wave of projectile vomit are the key elements of this "guy walks into an agent's office" yarn, which began life as a risque vaudeville dressing-room routine, and has since ripened into "the filthiest joke ever told". In Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette's celebrated documentary The Aristocrats, an astonishing array of comedians (George Car-lin, Robin Williams, Drew Carey, Whoopi Goldberg et al) line up to recount variously obscene versions of this gag, which has become a comedy cognoscenti test of the teller's ability to "push the envelope".
Every conceivable version of the joke is duly delivered: a mime artist lets his actions do the talking; a card-sharp plays the deck for knuckle-shuffle laughs; the cast of South Park even lends a deadpan animated twist. En passant, our assembled gag-taggers muse haphazardly upon the confrontational nature of humour (shock v satire), ponder the internal structure of the "perfect gag" (all set-up, no punchline), and provoke everything from a yawn to a grimace to a guffaw with their ribald riffs on this backstage parlour game.
According to popular legend, someone once strung out a version of "The Aristocrats" for 90 minutes and, watching this entertaining, frustrating and ultimately rather self-congratulatory documentary, you get the sense that the director, Prov-enza, is doing the same thing. The strength and the failure of The Aristocrats both lie in the fact that, as most of its participants agree, the joke itself isn't actually funny. Rather, it is the ability of individual comedians to wring shocked hilarity from its taboo premise, and (more importantly) the setting in which they do it that matter. Gilbert Gottfried's widely acknowledged "funniest ever" telling of the gag (footage of which is included here) struck home largely because he told it in the wake of 9/11, at a roast of an alarmed Hugh Hefner who (for once) simply didn't know where to put himself. Having been told by hecklers that jokes about changing planes at the Empire State Building were simply "too soon", Gottfried downshifted up into a tirading Aristocrats routine - an act of such reckless endangerment as to provoke life-threatening hilarity among shell-shocked onlookers, who were left "coughing up bits of lung".
No such transgressive frisson fires the video-diary deliveries of the comedians captured at their leisure in The Aristocrats. Although one major American cinema chain refused to run the movie, it is hard to imagine anyone (participants or audience members) actually being shocked by the vulgar verbal gymnastics. In fact, after a while the spectacle of increasingly boorish comics delighting in their own ability to be allegedly outrageous wears rather thin, particularly when the thrust of their obscenities remains, for the most part, oddly conformist and drearily macho. Yes, there are several laughs and a few incisive insights on offer. But the backslapping guff about the joke being the comedy equivalent of an improvisational jazz riff perhaps says less about the revolutionary nature of the gag itself than about the inherent humourlessness of some professional comedians.
Back in the 1970s, Asylum was the title of a creaky British horror portmanteau (tagline: "You have nothing to lose . . . but your mind!") in which the dismembered parts of a murdered wife escape from a freezer to haunt an errant husband's lover. Although more highbrow in appearance and intent, the new Asylum (from a novel by Patrick McGrath) is every bit as daft as its namesake. Marton Csokas stars as the incarcerated maniac Edgar, whose tempestuous nature lures the frustrated keeper's wife Stella (star/executive producer Natasha Richardson) into his web of "morbid jealousy".
Things start out all Lady Chatterley, with Richardson gazing longingly at the clammy, saw-wielding Csokas, who promptly smears her lipstick and rogers her on the cold stone floor. After that, we move into psychological histrionics, which predictably end in tragedy - not once, not twice, but three times. David Mackenzie, the Young Adam helmsman, gamely attempts to evoke the spiralling windmills of the mind with endless shots of people gazing meaningfully through broken glass, and much sinister lurking.
The period setting (late 1950s, apparently) is flagged up by vintage suspender belts and fleeting shots of Routemaster buses, lending a cod-nostalgic sheen to the frankly prehistoric mind games. Hats off to "Serena" McKellen, however, for managing to keep a straight face in an "old queen" role that cries out for "Oooh mat-ron!" interjections at every juncture.
