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PENN JILLETTE & PAUL PROVENZA
Contributed by Michael J. Lee, Executive Editor
for Radio Free Entertainment
July 19, 2005
In the comedic documentary The Aristocrats, comedians Penn Jillette (one half of duo Penn and Teller) and Paul Provenza round up a bunch of their friends in the business to deliver their takes on what some people refer to as "the dirtiest joke ever told"--an old, improvised vaudeville routine in which the comic incorporates whatever taboo elements come to mind, from incest to bestiality, from bodily fluids and orifices to human waste. The joke's punchline is anti-climactic, but the humor comes in the creativity of the graphic details and, of course, the delivery.
The Aristocrats features about a hundred comics delivering their own versions of the joke and discussing the history behind it. The extensive cast includes Robin Williams, George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg, Drew Carey, Chris Rock, Jon Stewart, Gilbert Gottfried, Paul Reiser, Jason Alexander, Bob Saget, Sarah Silverman, Steven Wright, and the animated characters of South Park.
In this interview, Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza (who served as producer and director, respectively) talk about working together in the making of this film.
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The Interview
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MEDIA: Were you able to get Bill Cosby to tell a version of the Aristocrats joke?
PENN: Bill Cosby we actually got fairly close to, and talked to a good friend of his. Same thing with Woody Allen. Same with a few others that are conspicuous in their absence. But one of the basic ideas of this movie was not to seduce. Studios are desperate. Studios have to engage talent. We were calling friends. So when I called somebody and they said, "Let me think about it," I never called them again. If you call a friend to have coffee and he says, "I don't really know," you don't call him again, you know? This is a friendship thing. Of course, everything is business. It's show business, and I don't want to pretend...But most important, it was the two of us f*cking around. That was more important, so we didn't push anybody. So Bill Cosby might have said yes if I called him a few more times. And this is really important: we don't know any of the reasons that anybody said no, because we didn't want to know. When you ask someone out to dinner and they say no, it's very rude to push that reason. So some of them, I think, were sincerely busy. And some of them probably didn't want to do it. But we don't know the difference, and they're still friends of ours. So I think it's a terrific thing.
Did you ask Jerry Seinfeld to contribute his version?
PAUL: Yes, I did ask Seinfeld, actually, and he laughed so hard when I told him what we were doing. But it was right around the time that Comedian was being released, and he said, "You know, it sounds like it might be overlap, and I don't feel right about doing another project that sounds so similar to what I did." Of course, it ended up being not similar at all, except that it's a behind-the-scenes comedy. But he was really supportive, and in fact, turned me on to some other people. I don't know if he's seen it yet. I don't think he has. You know, the other thing that's interesting is that it's a bad idea on paper. [laughs] I mean, if somebody had come to me with this, I'd go, "I don't know about that." I mean, it's really astonishing, the leap of faith that people took in doing this, because it's just a bad idea. And they would say, "How exactly are you going to put this together?" And we'd go, "We have no idea. We really don't know."
Are there comedians who you would have loved to have in this film, but who were unable to participate?
PENN: There are some heartbreakers on this. Buddy Hackett. I called Buddy Hackett. I talked with him for probably fifteen minutes. He told me two or three versions of the joke, he told me other jokes, he got it, he understood it, and then just said, "I'm just too f*cking old. I'm not doing anything else." I had the exact same story, the exact same day, of Rodney Dangerfield. Hung up on Buddy Hackett, picked up Rodney Dangerfield. He gave me the same thing, told the joke. Now if I were the kind of Michael Moore scumbag who tapes his calls, I bet they would have given me permission to use that. The other one is Johnny Carson, who is a very big supporter of this movie. I had a date to show him the movie after it was done at Sundance. And Johnny...this is his favorite joke. He loved the idea, he was behind it and wanted to see it, but Johnny was retired. And respect dictates that you don't go, "No, no, you like the idea...come on, Johnny!" And we wanted him so badly in this movie. So Buddy Hackett, Rodney Dangerfield, and Johnny Carson should've been in it, wanted to be in it, but it was made too late. That's the only problem. And all things said, it would have changed the feeling of the movie to have that much sadness focused on it, no matter how good they were. It's bad enough that Jay Marshall, who has been a mentor of Teller's and mine for 35 years, died three weeks ago--the first person to tell the joke in the movie died. Someone said, "Are you going to put a little dedication in?" And I said, "What could be a bigger dedication than him being the first one in the movie to tell it?"
PAUL: [to Penn] Especially after how many years in show business? Seventy?
PENN: [laughs] You know, there's 140 hours that were cut out of this movie, and Jay Marshall talks about how when he was like 8 in vaudeville, he heard this joke. [laughs] I mean, we really have it traced back forever.
PAUL: Yeah, he heard it from a guy who was an old guy at the time, who said that he heard it when he was a kid in vaudeville. Of course, the other great thing is the fact that somebody was telling this to an 8 year old. [laughs]
Is that the furthest back in time you can trace the joke?
PAUL: That's the earliest that we can, with any reasonable certainty, put it back.
PENN: Jay is the earliest we've gotten it. And everybody will say it's been around forever. And then the question is, what's the definition of forever in comedy terms? Is that 60 years? Or is that 600 years? [laughs] There's no way of knowing, and I think that the times they've tried to trace back jokes, it's been a miserable failure. It's just really hard scholarship to do.
Because it has largely been a verbal form of entertainment?
PAUL: Yeah, exactly. And that's the other interesting thing about it. This joke, and this movie I guess is sort of part and parcel of it, really is sort of like the bastard stepchild of the great American storytelling, oral tradition. These jokes have been around forever. And of course, Chaucer's filled with filthy jokes, and Shakespeare's full of d*ck jokes, and it goes back. And you can see the origins of some of the jokes that we've heard at parties in the last two weeks. So it's also another interesting thing to throw light on that.
PENN: Not only an oral tradition, but also an oral tradition that's not taken seriously. It's harder to do scholarship on early days of Juggs magazine than National Geographic--even though they use some of the same pictures.
George Carlin's version of the joke sounds like it could have gone on for another hour. How extensive was the editing process in this film?
PENN: Everybody could have done that for another hour. There's a lot of time spent on how talented the people in this movie are, and they certainly are among the most talented people in the world, and certainly in comedy in the United States. But then you've got to go to what Provenza did. The raw footage is just beautiful, but you would need to be a special kind of person to understand how great it is. The thing that Provenza did that really surprised me is...I knew we had a great movie for us and everybody in comedy. Provenza found a way, through editing and through his sensibility, to explain what he personally loves about comedy. And you've got this movie that is my two favorite things in art: it's a collaboration, and it's absolutely a single man's vision. And those are the two things you want most. I remember once when I was dating a geologist in the '70s, Apocalypse Now came out, and this woman said to me, "I don't want to see one man's ego trip." And I said, "I don't ever want to see anything else." So the hard part of this movie is taking this huge collaboration of all these brilliant men and women, and then filtering it through one person's sensibility so you don't get a committee. And committees just make everything beige. That's the only thing they'll ever agree on. And Provenz, man...I think when you see this movie, you come out knowing a lot more about comedy and a lot more about Paul Provenza. That's the part that's really good.
Did the movie take many different forms in the editing room?
PAUL: Actually, it was over a year of editing. [phone makes noises] I'm trying to figure how to turn this off. Sorry.
PENN: [grabs at phone]
PAUL: [to Penn] No, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop! It's important. It's the clinic. They've got your results.
PENN: [laughs]
PAUL: [getting back to the interview] I sat with this footage for months and months and months, and all I did was watch the footage over and over and over again. And I transcribed all of it myself, so I got to know it really intimately well--or as Emery, who I edited it with, puts it, I was like Rain Man with the footage. But what happened was ideas were starting to emerge, and I would get a sense of certain things that were being captured. So I had an idea of what those things were, and so I just built these huge sort of arcs that swam around in those ideas. So in this particular case, it didn't take really different shapes because the ideas were so clear. And they were a lot of the same ideas that Penn and I talked about on the first day that we thought about this at the Peppermill in Las Vegas. So many of those ideas were coming clear in the process of it. So I knew that those were the things that we wanted to work on. It took a lot of different twists and turns, but it basically was about those ideas every step of the way. Having said that, if somebody really wanted to do it, you could go back in and make about a thousand different movies, all of which are cogent, all of which have ideas in them, and all of which are absolutely hilarious. There is definitely an infinite variety of movies that can be made from it. But we wanted to make the one that was about the ideas that meant the most to us, which is about creativity, individuality, art, freedom.
PENN: You know, there's Charlie Chaplin and there's Buster Keaton. Charlie Chaplin did trial and error. He just kept doing stuff until it seemed to be okay to him. Buster Keaton had an idea in his head and just presented it. And I pushed really hard in this movie for Provenza to do that--bringing about an idea. You could take this footage and keep putting it in front of focus groups and get yourself a movie that would get this many laughs, but it wouldn't be this satisfying. We knew we had funny from the moment we turned the camera on Bobby Slayton, who was the first. It was making sure that it had a richness as well as that. And Provenza just kind of glazed over this like it was no real big deal, but I think you should really make note of it: he transcribed 140 hours himself. Typed it out. And then, although I didn't understand it at the time, he sat for a few months like f*cking Mozart and made the movie in his head, and then found a way to tell that story with the footage. So there was a lot of playing around, but this is not a trial and error movie. And we live in a time when people say, "This is what plays. Get Tom Cruise, get big monsters. Do this, do that, and you'll be able to get stuff that's okay." And you do get stuff that's okay, but you're never going to go better until you open up your heart. You can't do it with your head.
PAUL: Just to add to that, since Penn's sucking my c*ck right now...I feel like I owe him a bl*wjob in return...One of the really profound things that Penn did in that process was to really, really encourage me to take chances and to encourage me to really listen to an inner voice, and to not listen to other people's opinions. And Penn was really adamant about making sure that my voice was clear, and I can't imagine any other time in show business where the guy who financed the movie is telling the guy who's putting it together, "Please make it more and more specific to what you like, and less what other people like." [laughs] That's a pretty astonishing thing to have happened, and I'm spoiled for life now.
With all the raw footage, are we going to get a giant DVD set out of this in the future?
PAUL: If enough people go to see the movie, then we hope to do a project that's rather elaborate.
PENN: But remember...I really was not lying when I said that the raw footage is good, but more of what you like about this movie is Paul Provenza than you might think at first blush. And we've talked about somewhere down the line--five, six, seven years--having the Aristocrats project, which is Provenza doing in the DVD format, which is maybe five or six hours, what he did in the movie format, which is 90 minutes. That would be wonderful to see down the line. In the meantime, there might be a DVD that has some extra footage. But the footage that's there, what Carlin called a snapshot of comedy at the turn of the century, is still great, but you're going to like it much more if Provenz holds you by the hand when you're watching it.
Was there anything that needed to be censored because it was too offensive or too outrageous?
PAUL: We have "n*gger c*nts." What more do you want? [jokes] You people are never satisfied!
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