From
a New York Observer article about the Friar's Roast of Hugh Hefner a few years ago where Gilbert Gottfried told the Aristocrats joke:
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"A man--a talent agent is sitting in his office. A family walks in. A man, woman, two kids, their little dog, and the talent agent goes, 'What kind of an act do you do?'
"At the father's signal, Mr. Gottfried said, the family disrobes en masse. "The father starts fucking his wife," he said. "The wife starts jerking off the son. The son starts going down on the sister. The sister starts fingering the dog's asshole." Mr. Gottfried's voice was growing stronger. "Then the son starts blowing his father."
The Hilton's ballroom filled with the sounds of sudden exhalations. The comedians on the dais were bug-eyed with laughter and recognition. Some of the men had dropped to all fours.
Mr. Gottfried was beaming.
"Want me to start at the beginning?" he asked.
He kept going, turning the joke into an extended bacchanal of bodily fluids, excrement, bestiality and sexual deviance. Mr. Gottfried plumbed the darkest crevices he could find. He riffed and riffed until people in the audience were coughing and sputtering and sucking in great big gulps of air. Tears ran throughout the Hilton ballroom, as if Mr. Gottfried had performed a collective tracheotomy on the audience, delivering oxygen and laughter past the grief and ash that had blocked their passageways.
Then he brought it home.
"The talent agent says, 'Well, that's an interesting act. What do you call yourselves?'"
Mr. Gottfried threw up his hands. "And they go, 'The Aristocrats!'"
There was a sound in the room that went beyond laughter.
Mr. Gottfried had gone to "The Aristocrats," the comedy equivalent of the B-flat below high C that Leontyne Price had sung at Carnegie Hall on Sunday. "The Aristocrats" is one of the definitive inside jokes among comedians. It is so definitive that comic Paul Provenza and performance artist Penn Jillette are making a digital documentary about the joke. "Every comic makes it their own," Mr. Provenza said. "The set-up is the same and the punch line is the same," but the comic puts his or her "own stamp" on the material in between.
Mr. Gottfried had used it to save himself, but also to lift the crowd to another place.
A few minutes later, Alan King paid him a high compliment.
"Forgive me," he said. "I'm just still a little touched by that asshole Gottfried."
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