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

[vakkotaur]

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.

Comments

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

I consider myself an easily amused person, but modern comedy just doesn't do it for me. No cleverness at all in it. Henny Youngman and the old folks had it down to a science, I miss them.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

The original phrase was, as I understand it, "tinker's dam" - something inconsequential that he used to plug up a hole. Some people used the phrase as a euphemism for "damn".

[wordslinger.livejournal.com]

Ya beat me to the punch.

Tinker's dam is something he used to put around a hole in the pot he was mending (dam to prevent the metal from running past the hole.)

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

The definition (http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/tinkers-damn.html) seems to have been vague for a while, at least.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

More precisely, a tinker's dam was a piece of tin or something that held solder or molten lead in place while patching up a pot, then was thrown away afterwards. So, really worthless.

[nefaria.livejournal.com]

But if a tinker had a contract to fix a rich guy's fancy pot and he couldn't find any dams about, I bet he'd be willing to pay big bucks for one!

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Actually I was wrong; they're made of clay, not tin. The tin is used to patch the pot, duh. The tinker's dam is a lump of clay pressed around the pot to hold the molten tin in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_worth_a_tinker's_dam

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

Also, I don't understand people who think Tim Conway is funny - or Will Farrell, for that matter.

[wordslinger.livejournal.com]

I don't see what's funny about them, either. Didn't think Lenny Bruce was funny, either.

If you bleeped out the bad words, a lot of material would be pretty vapid. It needs shock value because it isn't funny or intriguing or even interesting.

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

Bruce had his moments. I happen to LOVE George Carlin, best known for his stuff about "bad" words, but I think he's pretty funny with or without that and I liked his stuff before he started doing that.

I feel similarly about Bill Hicks although I don't think he was as good as Carlin (also he got on his soapbox way too much).

SOME of Sam Kinison's stuff was funny but I think he thought it would be funnier if he YELLED, and it wasn't.

ARE there any decent young comics out there? I haven't seen any.

[foolscap001.livejournal.com]

I admit to not having seen Tim Conway much since the days of The Carol Burnett Show, but back then, at least, I thought he was very funny. Admittedly, I was twelve then, but OTOH, seeing reruns of clips from the show still make me laugh (the one that leaps to mind is the sketch in which he goes off on a tangent about Siamese twin elephants, joined at the trunk, so that when they try to trumpet they just go "hnorf").

[jcw-da-dmg.livejournal.com]

And then what happened?

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I saw that clip on a show about TV comedy a few weeks ago. I recall laughing, but I'm not sure if I was laughing at Tim Conway's stuff itself or that he'd messed up the rest of the cast and they were cracking up, and I was therefore laughing more at their reaction.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Here's that clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qqE_WmagjY

The reactions are the best part! It's a battle of wills between Tim Conway and the rest of the cast, him trying to crack them up and them trying not to.

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

Simple, if enough people find him funny to pay the bills, then he's funny.

Funny is a very subjective thing, and as a stand-up comedian myself this was a lesson I learned *very* early on. Lately, there have been several jokes in my act that even I don't find all that humourous, but the audience loves them, so they keep getting trotted out. (You may ask how I wrote them then if I don't find them funny, but a good comic has to know what the audience will find funny, not just what he finds funny.) Lenny Bruce, for example, won't do good in a room full of blue-hairs (although he performed long enough ago that he might, but you get the jist of this phrase), but he would in a room full of college students. Is Lenny Bruce funny? Depends who you ask. If *no one* finds you funny (and I've seen a few struggling amateur comics who fall under this) then you're not funny but, as a rule, if someone finds you funny, then you're funny.

[brodycatsmouth.livejournal.com]

I always thought the purpose of the joke was to see how long a person would listen to a gross-out narrative before giving up on the joke. Kind of like improv practice.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I suppose, but then it's not so much a joke as an endurance test. I liken such things to be why I have a problem with some on-going "jokes": There is a difference between a running gag and a run-into-the-ground gag. Alas, some don't seem aware of this difference.

[brodycatsmouth.livejournal.com]

On this subject, i remember listening to the audio commentary from Mike Myers on the first Austin Powers movie. He was commenting on the unfreezing scene where he peed and peed and kept interrupting the automatic announcer voice. He mentioned that this is a type of humor he likes to call "endurance humor", where it is funny, then gets old, then gets funny again, all while doing the exact same thing.

I think it's kind of related to the principle of the Aristocrats in that way...at what point do people start laughing at the grossness of the joke, while not waiting for the punchline? Some do, but some just wait and wait and walk away wondering what the point was.

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, but I suspect most "Endurance humor" is very difficult to pull off and I imagine that for a good many, the endurance alone means it doesn't quite ever become funny again. Instead it just comes across as trying too hard.

Perhaps I have a problem with extended jokes as I tend to follow the idea the rule of good comedy is to set up the joke, do the joke, and get out. Sort of one-two punch or almost hit & run rather than an extended journey. At least at the punch-line. A slow build can work, but once the joke is over, it's best to get off of the stage. Trying to stay on stage and then have the joke die of old age and hope for its resurrection seems pretty shaky prospect at best.

[malterre.livejournal.com]

Completely off-topic but is this a picture of you??? :)
http://wooing.renspace.com/

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I have no idea as the page appears to load then displays nothing at all. Trying to view source only tells me that there isn't any. Does this mean I'm the man who wasn't there?

If you can save an image or a screenshot and put the image somepalce I can see it, then I tell you if what you see is me.

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

The "Aristocrats" joke is one I've never found all that funny. Not really for the vulgarities in the joke (the few times I've heard it, it's pretty tame compared to what I imagine it could be), but just because I don't find the punchline (and the premise) really all that humourous. (And again, not because I'm a prude either, there are several other jokes where vulgarity is also needed for the joke, and are funny, but I just thought the premise of "naming your act something that's opposite of what it is" not that funny.)

I am reminded of an incident that happened to me when I was six years old. There was a kid in my class (I even remember his name to this day, Troy Cox) that always used to steal my tuque ("knit winter cap" to you Americans ;) ) and say "Fuck! *tee hee hee*" Apparently, to him, the mere act of saying "fuck" brought him into a fit of the giggles. There are many Troy Coxes to this day. They tend to be of the 18-25 year old male variety, which are the type of people advertisers have wet dreams over and that frequent comedy clubs. To make a room full of Troy Coxes laugh, all you have to do is say "fuck" (and I've seen this done on stage). That's it. "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side." - not funny. "Why did the fuckin' chicken cross the fuckin' road? To get to the other fuckin' side!" - funny. Same joke, but just with three "fuckin'"s added. Of course a room full of people over the age of 35 would find the original funny, but they don't go to comedy clubs (at least not as much as their younger bretheren) or buy comedy albums or go to comedy concerts, so the cruder version gets told.

This post has made me wonder what Troy Cox, who would be in his mid-thirties by now, finds funny?

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

I have no idea. Perhaps he's a cable network producer or executive?

As someone above posted, George Carlin is or at least can be funny. But he's generally smart about it. His famous bit on the "Seven Words" for example isn't funny just because he says the seven words. It's funny because he analyzes them and people's reaction to language. "Never mind the literal meaning, these two are just busy words." and such. The vulgarity is there, but it's not the point. How people react to mere words is the point. Any shock is mere spice, rather than main dish.

I agree about the Aristocrats joke not being all that funny, even if told tame. The example I read was not all tame and I did not feel that the vulgarity added anything to what little humor might have been there. I suppose it's like Carlin knows to use a dash of hot sauce when making chili, but someone else poured a bottle of hot sauce on a couple beans and called it chili. A spice is not itself a main dish and ought not be used as such.