The Aristocrats, ta dah

It's interesting that my riff on The Aristocrats, shown below, in its attempt to push in directions the comics in the movie hadn't gone, pulled out the Downs Syndrome thing, just like Sarah Silverman did, as I saw when we resumed watching. I went for the total sick gross-out groove, which is something in the context of that joke.

But my version was morbid, not funny. For the most part, it is a life-affirming joke. Violent, disgusting, yes, but at the end of the day, it's straight out of Mikhail Bakhtin's 1965 classic book on Rabelais. Sex, excretions, violence, it's all about life. OK, the incest part is pushing it. That's why Gilbert Godfrey breaking it out so hard in late September, 2001 was such a big deal: very much Le chaim, fisting or no. As Warhol's Frankenstein put it: "To know life you must fuck death in the gall bladder."

It all took me back to Dushan Makaveyev's movies, esp. Sweet Movie, where, if memory serves correctly, there's actually an on-stage shitting contest, as well as a stabbing in a boat full of sugar and naked or bikini chicks in a vat of (one presumes) chocolate. A must see, if slow.