101 NARRATIONS
Talking dirty with Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza of 'The Aristocrats'
By Andy Klein
The movie The Aristocrats is about the joke "The Aristocrats," which is about a variety act called The Aristocrats. All three are unspeakably filthy; the first - which is opening in Los Angeles on July 29, courtesy of ThinkFilm - is also unspeakably funny.
Comedians Paul Provenza (director/producer) and coproducer Penn Jillette (sans Teller) interviewed roughly a hundred other comedians - from the likes of Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg to a lot of people you've likely never heard of - about the joke, which has a sort of classic status; then Provenza cannily organized the material into its current form. The resulting film is not - contrary to some descriptions - a hundred comics doing a hundred versions of the same joke; it's much richer than that. People talk about when they first heard it ... and what they think is wrong with it ... and a bunch of other stuff.
I recently did a three-way with Jillette and Provenza.
I mean, on the phone, of course.
It's still all sticky.
Let's start with the most painfully obvious question, which I'm sure you've answered before: So, how did this project come to be?
Penn Jillette: Well, Provenza and I have spent a lot of time in our very long relationship, talking late at night over a cup of coffee very, very pretentiously ... .
Paul Provenza: When we're not fucking.
Jillette: ... and one night I was telling him about when Jay Marshall - an old-timer who just died, actually, four days ago, a good friend of mine - had just told someone the "Banjo Sandwich" joke. Just then I walked up and asked what was so funny, and Jay - rather than repeat the joke - asked the other guy to tell it to me. So the guy repeated the joke exactly as he had heard it from Jay with his own little changes. And at that moment, just perfectly, Michael Goudeau walked up and said, "What are you laughing at, Penn?" And Jay said, "Penn, you tell him the joke." And then we kind of engineered it so there was a line of about 12 people ... .
And watching a comedian hear a joke and then instantly tell it again and put it to his style, I thought was fascinating. So Provenza said, "You know, we should do a movie about everybody telling the same joke." And then we had to think of which joke it would be, and "The Aristocrats" came to mind instantly.
We thought there'd be 20 people, just our dirtbag friends. And then our less-close friends ended up being really interested, and it just kind of snowballed from there. Even though Provenz made it better and better with the editing and with the directing, he never contradicted the original premise: It really does express what we were talking about in Pepper Mill that night ... a sort of parallel to jazz, where you have people take turns taking solos over the same changes.
I assume there were people you approached who didn't participate because of scheduling and all that stuff ... .
Jillette: We have no way of knowing. I made most of the phone calls to get people in it, and there was absolutely no seduction whatsoever. It was a yes or no instantly ... . If a person said, "Let me think about it," or "Umm ... "
Provenza: ... or "Call me next week" ...
Jillette: ... or if someone said, "I'm not sure about my schedule," they were never called again. Nobody was begged to be in this movie. And, sadly, because of that, there were some people who sincerely were talking about scheduling where we just said, "Fuck 'em."
A few months ago, Frank Rich wrote a column about Gilbert Gottfried telling "The Aristocrats" at a Friars Club Roast two and a half weeks after 9/11, and the positive side of its shock value. [A clip of the event is in the film.] Was that part of the inspiration?
Jillette: No, no, no. I think one of the big and beautiful lies in the movie is that the chronology of it is off. It's very Michael Moore in that way. We were shooting Gilbert telling the joke just weeks before he told it at the Friars.
Provenza: It's a misconception that the movie was inspired by that.
Jillette: And it's a misconception that Provenza works very hard in the movie to perpetuate.
Did you talk to any academics?
Provenza: Where are those academics exactly? What's the office number?
Yeah, I don't know. Does the Library of Congress collect jokes in the field? There must be somebody ... folklore studies?
Provenza: That brings up a really interesting point, which is that these kinds of jokes, which come and go and are so disposable, whatever, they've kept going in various forms for centuries. To me, joke-telling is really in the great tradition of American storytelling. It has all the same writing and performance virtues that great storytelling has, but it's never regarded as that. And I think a great joke deserves the respect of a great haiku or a great novelette. So how come the guy who wrote "Big Orange Head" isn't up for a Pulitzer?
Jillette: Only because we can't find him. Even the Internet hasn't cracked this particular oral tradition. You think the Navajo have an oral tradition ... .
Now you've got me thinking about what the Neanderthal version of "The Aristocrats" would be.
Provenza: I smell sequel! Actually, it would be a prequel, wouldn't it?
Jillette: "Yes, from the very beginning we've always seen this as a trilogy." Try that fuckin' George Lucas lie! I mean why, when he says that, why don't people say, "You lying sack of talentless shit! You never conceived it as three movies, you dipshit!" But no one says that, they just go, "He's a fuckin' genius," because he put a guy in a Bigfoot suit."
Oh, you're gonna love the new film.
Jillette: I'm not gonna see the new film, cocksucker!
Provenza: I'll see it if I've got nothing else to do and somebody talks me into it.
Jillette: "Something else" includes breathing.
Provenza: Because I like to stay up on the popular culture thing ...
Jillette: It's not popular culture, it's a bunch of douchebags trying to relive their youth!
Provenza: I hate to break it to ya: That's a big part of popular culture.
One of the things the film does is give us this picture of life behind the curtain, life backstage. Are there other movies, fictional movies about the life of being a comedian that you think come close?
Provenza: Bobby Slayton called a mutual friend of ours one day in the middle of the afternoon, and said, "It's Bobby. Listen, I'm at the opening of Punchline. It's about five minutes in. I just had to call and tell you: The comics have lockers." Click. And that's all we needed to know. While it's just a locker, it speaks volumes ... . Actually, somebody else - it may have been Bobby as well - saw Punchline and said, "Now we know how cops feel when they go to the movies."
Published: 05/26/2005
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