Free How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee

comprising a man, his wife and their two children, whose performance is then described in as much pungent, pornographic and scatological detail as possible, limited only by the imagination and scruples of the teller. The horrified agent then asks what the act is called. The man replies, ‘The Aristocrats.’ The humour arises from the contrast between the repellent nature of the act and the polite, gentle title it has been given. The lure of the Aristocrats gag for the film-makers appeared to be the infinitely extendable central section, which pushes boundaries of both endurance and taste, and has, on occasion, been stretched out for as long as an hour and a half.
    I interviewed Paul Provenza, himself a stand-up, about his film later that year for the Sunday Times.
    The editing process reflected a conscious decision to make the movie about ideas. In fact, we ended up doing some comics a disservice because we didn’t necessarily use their funniest bit, but the bit that best helped to illustrate the ideas of the movie clearly. The movie starts repetitively, but if you listen to each version of the joke, hearing the same gag again and again shows how people take off with it and create different things. In the first six minutes George Carlin does a version that’s totally grossed-out and scatological, then we move on to Drew Carey teaching us how to do the joke, then into a riff constructed entirely of little sound-bites until, I think, your moral judgment is suspended. You’ve been bludgeoned . Boom! And then you can concentrate on the absurdity of the thing, the structure of the gag, and thedifferent layers of offence. It’s about the singer not the song. Repeating the same joke actually allows us to get over the issue of content and concentrate instead on the thorny issue of aesthetics.
     
    For me, hearing Provenza say this last sentence was like a cartoon lightbulb appearing over my head. This was what I had been trying to do in comedy for nearly twenty years, but I’d never heard the idea expressed with any degree of clarity.
    Sometime around the mid-point of the film, after an especially hilarious sequence in which a clown-faced mime acted out the gag silently on Venice Beach, there was a twenty-minute section where, for me, the joke wore thin. I began to feel as if I was being dragged through a trench of filth. The violence against women in the various versions of the story became so relentless that when Bob Saget described one of the male performers smashing his penis repeatedly into a drawer, I was almost relieved because at least it offered some respite. That said, other sections of the comedian-packed cinema were still splitting their sides. *
    * There can be something utterly hysterical about imaginatively framed obscenity. One of my all-time-favourite routines remains one which Sean Lock performed, I think only once, in about April 1990. Sean, today a popular TV personality and consequently able to play the crowds he always deserved, pictured himself sitting on a toilet, defecating, and looking down to realise that the first stool to emerge from his anus has splashed down into the toilet bowl in the shape of a penis. A second stool emerges. To Sean’s delight it is in the shape of a vagina. The penis-shaped stool and the vaginashaped stool begin bumping into each other in the water of the toilet, at which point, aroused by the activity of the genital-shaped stools, Sean falls to his knees at the bowl and begins to pleasure himself. Sean must have made this story last ten minutes, and I was weeping with laughter, admittedly alone. Whenever I see him I always ask him about this bit and tell him it was the best thing he’s ever done, apart from his BBC2 sitcom, and that he should do it again one day, which seems to irritate him no end.
     
    Seen in public, The Aristocrats becomes a living object lesson in the fact that a one-size-fits-all approach to makingdecisions about what is acceptable just won’t fit. It