The Aristocrats

This Sean Burns review from Philadelphia Weekly finds deeper meaning in this summer's hot comedy documentary:

And still, despite all these fascinating insights into performance and technique, I daresay there's even something more to The Aristocrats. As this almost unbearable parade of unprintable degradation soldiers on, it's only late into it that we stumble onto the movie's real reason for being.

It was the New York Friar's Club Roast for Hugh Hefner back in November 2001, a scant few weeks after the World Trade Center massacre. Mole-eyed, homuncular dynamo Gilbert Gottfried emerges and apologizes for being late, as his "flight was rerouted through the Empire State Building." Gottfried, perhaps the only comic sick enough to already have a routine chock-full of 9/11 material, is roundly booed. He's momentarily at a loss, until suddenly-right there at the podium-Gottfried focuses with a look of menace unseen in a movie since just before De Niro kills Keitel in Taxi Driver. You can practically hear him thinking: "Okay, you motherfuckers just asked for this."

"A guy walks into a talent agent's office ... "

Suddenly the movie's no longer just the etymology of the world's filthiest gag, but something deeper and more vital. During the strange music of Gottfried's endlessly appalling, shrieking cadences, The Aristocrats becomes something cleansing and cathartic-a reminder that there's often nothing better than an old dirty joke to clear the air, to blow the stink off all our "civilized" manners and hang-ups, and confront the unspeakable, if only in a sideways fashion.

For all its filth The Aristocrats is humanizing and electric. It's the kind of dirty movie that makes you feel glad to be alive.