"The Aristocrats" is a taboo-defying, off-color joke that has been told by numerous stand-up comedians and dates back to the vaudeville era. [1] It relates the story of a family trying to get an agent to book their stage act, which is remarkably vulgar and offensive. The punch line reveals that they incongruously bill themselves as "The Aristocrats". [2] When told to audiences who know the punch line, the joke's humor depends on the described outrageousness of the family act. [3] [4]
Because the objective of the joke is its transgressive content, it is most often told privately, [5] such as by comedians to other comedians. [6] It came to wider public when Gilbert Gottfried told it during the Friars' Club roast of Hugh Hefner to recover after losing the crowd and eliciting "booing and hissing" with a joke about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which had occurred just 18 days prior. [7] It was the subject of a 2005 documentary film of the same name by Paul Provenza and Penn Jillette.
This joke typically has these elements—alternative versions may change this form.
Henry "Henny" Youngman was a British-born American comedian and musician famous for his mastery of the "one-liner", his best known being "Take my wife... please".
Stand-up comedy is a comedy performance directed to a live audience in which the performer, known as a comedian, comic or "stand-up", stands on a stage and delivers various humorous and satirical monologues, and occasionally physical acts, typically involving no other props except a microphone and a stool. The performance is usually a rhetorical sketch with rehearsed scripts, but many comics employ live crowd interaction as part of their routine.
Jack Roy, better known by the pseudonym Rodney Dangerfield, was an American stand-up comedian, actor, screenwriter, and producer. He was known for his self-deprecating one-liner humor, his catchphrase "I don't get no respect!" and his monologues on that theme.
John Coger "Jackie" Martling, Jr. is an American stand-up comedian, writer, radio personality, author, actor, and musician also known as Jackie the Joke Man. He is best known as a former writer and in-studio comedian for The Howard Stern Show from 1983 to 2001.
Mitchell Lee Hedberg was an American stand-up comedian known for his surreal humor and deadpan delivery. His comedy typically featured short, sometimes one-line jokes mixed with absurd elements and non sequiturs.
Gilbert Jeremy Gottfried was an American stand-up comedian and actor, best known for his exaggerated shrill voice, strong New York accent, and his edgy, often controversial, sense of humor. His numerous roles in film and television include voicing Iago in the Aladdin animated franchise, Mr. Mxyzptlk in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Action, Digit LeBoid in Cyberchase, Kraang and Subprime in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He also played Mr. Peabody in the Problem Child film series.
Self-referential humor, also known as self-reflexive humor, self-aware humor, or meta humor, is a type of comedic expression that—either directed toward some other subject, or openly directed toward itself—is self-referential in some way, intentionally alluding to the very person who is expressing the humor in a comedic fashion, or to some specific aspect of that same comedic expression. Here, meta is used to describe that the joke explicitly talks about other jokes, a usage similar to the words metadata, metatheatrics and metafiction. Self-referential humor expressed discreetly and surrealistically is a form of bathos. In general, self-referential humor often uses hypocrisy, oxymoron, or paradox to create a contradictory or otherwise absurd situation that is humorous to the audience.
Off-color humor is humor that deals with topics that may be considered to be in poor taste or vulgar. Many comedic genres may incorporate "off-color" elements.
Rusty trombone is a sexual act in which a man stands with his knees and back slightly torqued with feet at least shoulder width apart to expose his anus. A person typically kneels behind the man and performs anilingus while reaching up beneath the scrotum or around the body to manually administer rapid up and down motions of the penis, mimicking the motions of a trombone player. The act is defined primarily by the physical orientation of the partners, the combination of anilingus with manual sexual stimulation and the resemblance of the anal sphincter to a trombone mouthpiece; however, other positions and variations are possible.
In comedy, a dick joke, duck joke, dork joke, penis joke, cock joke or knob joke is a joke that makes a direct or indirect reference to a human penis, also used as an umbrella term for dirty jokes. The famous quote from Mae West, "Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just excited to see me?" is cited as an example of a penis joke. The "dick joke" has been described as "often used as a metaphor for the male-defined nature of stand-up comedy". Dick jokes have also been noted to be both popular and effective with audiences:
Comics use what "works," and dick jokes are guaranteed to amuse audiences of both genders in a surprising variety of contexts. Simply put, dick jokes get the quickest and biggest laughs, and in stand-up comedy, size does matter.
Rhodri Paul Gilbert is a Welsh comedian and television and radio presenter who was nominated in 2005 for the Perrier Best Newcomer Award. In 2008 he was nominated for the main comedy award.
The Aristocrats is a 2005 American documentary comedy film about the famous eponymous dirty joke. The film was conceived and produced by comedians Penn Jillette, Paul Provenza and Peter Adam Golden, and it was edited by Emery Emery. Distributed by THINKFilm, it is dedicated to Johnny Carson, as "The Aristocrats" was said to be his favorite joke.
No Cure for Cancer is a Denis Leary standup routine from the early 1990s. It was made into a television special, a book, and a compact disc, all with the same title. Leary's routine focuses on vegetarians, cigarette smoking, drug use, and political correctness.
Anti-humor is a type of alternative humor that is based on the surprise factor of absence of an expected joke or of a punch line in a narration that is set up as a joke. This kind of anticlimax is similar to that of the shaggy dog story. In fact, some researchers see the "shaggy dog story" as a type of anti-joke. Anti-humor is described as a form of irony or reversal of expectations that may provoke an emotion opposite to humor, such as fear, pain, embarrassment, disgust, awkwardness, or discomfort.
Otto Sol Petersen was an American ventriloquist, comedian, and actor known for his act Otto and George, which he performed with his dummy George Dudley. Petersen began performing with George as a street act in Manhattan and Brooklyn in the early 1970s. In the late 1970s the act moved into night clubs and began to evolve into an "X-rated" act.
Rory Scot Albanese is an American comedian, comedy writer and television producer. He was a showrunner, executive producer and writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which he joined in 1999 and was with until October 2013. He was an executive producer and showrunner of The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore.
The September 11 attacks were a series of terrorist attacks by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda against the United States on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed. Jokes based on the events have been made in print and other media since soon after the attacks took place.
Emery Emery is an American comedian, film editor and producer, and outspoken atheist, known for his contribution to numerous comedy-related films and TV shows, his two podcasts, Skeptically Yours, and the award-winning Ardent Atheist. Further, he has the distinction of being a contributor to The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, and the editor of the documentary The Aristocrats.
Truly Tasteless Jokes is a book of off-color humor by Ashton Applewhite, first published in 1982 under the pen name "Blanche Knott." The book was a cultural phenomenon and spawned dozens of sequels, including the best-sellers Truly Tasteless Jokes Two (1983) and Truly Tasteless Jokes Three (1984) and a stand-up comedy special.
Gilbert is a 2017 American documentary film about the life and career of comedian Gilbert Gottfried. It opened in theaters on November 3, 2017.