So [blank] it's funny, isn't funny.

A locked post I read told a version of the "Aristocrats" joke. The only thing it did for me was explain the occasional posting of just "The Aristocrats!" in some thread or other. If you are not familiar, the alleged joke involves a talent agent, some act (generally a family) that is rude, lewd, and just plain appalling (scatological, incestuous, etc.) and at the end the rather shocked talent agent gets enough composure to ask the name of the act or, "What do you call yourselves?" only to be told, "The Aristocrats!" Alternate versions might have "The Sophisticates!" or similar names. The idea, it seems, is that the humor is in the incongruity of the name with the act. Supposedly this is also "the dirtiest joke ever told" and gets worse with each telling as people try to one-up each other on the vulgarity. Note that. The vulgarity increases. The humor, if any, does not. It's the same incongruity. The shock might increase, but after a while it hardly matters. More excrement or more incestuous acts doesn't do anything for the humor.

The person who posted this joke was a bit surprised by the negative reaction it got. It wasn't seen as funny, but just as crude. I suspect this falls into the "So crude it's funny" trap. There are funny jokes that happen to be crude. Much like there are funny jokes that happen to be stupid. The mistake is in thinking the the crudeness or the stupidity are what makes things funny. Those are just along for the ride.

I've often heard the line that something is "so stupid it's funny" and found the result was not funny, merely very stupid. Here I have a similar reaction. The idea might be "so crude it's funny" but all I get is that it's very crude. Many jokes depend on having some less than perfect aspect aspect to them. This is why self-deprecating humor works so well: you don't have to concern yourself about who is the butt of the joke. Rodney Dangerfield had this down. For that matter, so did Jack Benny though it might not have seemed obvious at the time.

While censorship is an ugly thing, some restraint can be a good thing. Some limits require a person to think about how to get a point across or do a joke without using cusswords and crudity as a comedic crutch. When my sister and I were much younger and living our folks, there was some show on the history of comedy. It had tantalizing clips of folks like Bob Hope, Jack Benny, and Burns and Allen. And also, I expect, Rodney Dangerfield and up through the folks who were in or had just had been in Saturday Night Live. After the show, Pa remarked on something. My sister and I had been lying on the floor as we watched and he was also watching us. We laughed almost uncontrollable at the early comedians, and didn't laugh much if at all for the more recent ones. It's not that we didn't get the jokes. It was that the jokes just weren't very funny. They were, as I have dubbed such things, subjests. They live in the comedic state of Almost. And Almost Funny... isn't funny.

Yes, shock can work. But not if you're desensitized to it from nearly continual exposure. Shock only works when it actually is shocking. "Not worth a tinker's damn" comes to mind. It's nothing unusual for the tinker to cuss. He's always cussing anyway. No shock. But if something happens and someone not known for cussing, the Pope perhaps, cuts loose with an expletive...that's shock that would work - once. It works by the sheer rarity and unexpectedness of it. Repeating it lowers the value, and fast. And even then the shock, by itself, is not necessarily funny.