THE TALKIES: Talking Dirty
Bowman, James
THE TALKIES JAMES BOWMAN Talking Dirty LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED." Readers of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn will remember that that was the final line, in the biggest type, on the...
...The film is being released without a rating, but every bit of publicity about it—including the review you are reading—assures us that it can tell the joke's set-up and punch line and no more...
...Readers of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn will remember that that was the final line, in the biggest type, on the handbill for a performance of The King's Camelopard or The Royal 44 Nonesuch in the town of Brickville, Arkansas...
...What do you call yourselves...
...The man calling himself the Duke of Bridgewater, who printed it up, had said: "There...
...asks the agent...
...One of its most interesting moments comes with Sarah Silverman's monologue in the persona of the daughter in the vaudeville act as she realizes for the first time that she has been raped...
...For both films, the publicity is designed to strike a spark of danger and excitement from the now-cold ashes of the conflagration that, in the 1950s and 1960s,destroyed so many of our cultural taboos and nearly all of those relating to sex...
...MIDI THE EONNIEST kIOYIE 1011ll EYES SEE...
...It's not an easy thing to do...
...SEPTEMBER 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 67...
...It's a family act, consisting of himself and his wife, their son and daughter, and a little dog...
...THE TALKIES J A M E S B O W M A N Talking Dirty ADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED...
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...In short, back in the days of the burlesque show and the 1 "OBSCENE DISEUSTIN6...
...That's why, though the comedians in The Aristocrats never quite admit it, they are really longing for those good old days before the col-lapse of the Official Culture in the 1960s when they could still be dangerous out-laws like Lenny Bruce—or at least could offer the audience what that other aristocrat, the Duke of Bridgewater, did, namely the excitement of descending into a licensed pit of sin and wickedness...
...If that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansas...
...Rules, as they say, were made to be broken, and so were taboos...
...I guess we are meant just to forget his earlier irresponsibility...
...After his own brief flirtation with the Vince Lombardi style of coaching, Billy Bob reverts to his former laissez-faire approach and ends up in the same camp as the new Official Culture, which holds that the point of Little League is not to win but to have fun...
...Likewise, both Andy Richter and Doug Stanhope tell the joke to little babies...
...I guess it is meant to be funny in a disturbing kind of way...
...Jillette puts it: "It's the singer, not the song...
...Yet the converse of that truism is that the pleasure of breaking taboos is directly proportional to the strength of the taboo in the first place...
...The first produced epic, tragedy, and the higher forms of romance...
...The Official Culture was that of morality, discipline, sacrifice, and earnestness, the Unofficial that of immorality, self-indulgence, cowardice, and laughter...
...Legend among comedians has it that the record for stretching it out is 90 minutes...
...Similarly, Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs, which opened recently, was according to its publicists the first film not made as pornography to show certain sexual acts...
...Finally, the description is over and the agent says: "That's quite an act...
...66 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2005"What do they do...
...r HE RUSSIAN LITERARY THEORIST, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), in his study Rabelais and His World distinguished between what he called the Official and Unofficial Cultures of the medieval and early modern periods...
...YUE6AB AND YIEE...
...The latest to try the trick is The Aristocrats...
...The new taboos are being offensive to women, minorities, or anyone who can claim to be ill or disabled, violating childish innocence, and smoking...
...The second produced the low comedy of the farce and the fabliau...
...Yet most people will wonder exactly what remains to distinguish it from pornography if it shows those acts...
...It's actually not a very funny joke, as several of the tellers in the film admit...
...The relation between the two, said Bakhtin, was "dialogic...
...Hollywood has always played around with taboos while being squeamish about actually breaking them...
...And it did fetch them, as it always has done...
...Even in the permissive world of today, where "ladies" have been admitted into the full fellowship of what are still sometimes called "dirty" books, movies, and theatrical exhibitions, the ratings systems for movies and television designed to protect children can also give them the thrill of looking into—well, if not the forbidden at least the discouraged...
...Throughout its history, the movie business in America has gone through periods when it has liked to think of itself as being daring and "transgressive," but all three of these films remind us that actually being daring and transgressive is a whole different kettle of sick...
...In Freudian terms, the Official Culture was the superego, the Unofficial the id...
...You could almost say that the joke is better because you don't have to laugh at it...
...The man answers: "The Aristocrats...
...Or, as Mr...
...If the kids had been a year or two older no one would have thought this funny...
...Compared with this, the publicity material's stress on the fact that only the set-up and the punch line can appear in a "family" publication like this one is pretty tame stuff...
...One or two of the interviewees in The Aristocrats toy with the idea of reintroducing some shock value into the joke by violating not the old, discarded taboos but those of the new Official Culture which has been cobbled together out of political correctness and the late 20th-century obsession with health and safety...
...The only time in the film when I laughed out loud was at Wendy Liebman's very clever reversal of its premise, where the body of the joke is pristine and all the obscenity is transferred to the punch line...
...Nobody has to go far to get off the reservation these days...
...The man then proceeds to describe in graphic detail a series of ever more disgusting acts of scatological abandon and sexual perversion...
...The hook is a contemporary equivalent of the Duke's "Ladies and Children not admitted...
...Without a strong and culturally potent moralism, immoralism becomes merely insipid...
...TBU I$j__U .t a tseratUl J A M E S B O W M A N stag film and the smoker—the days of "Ladies and children not admitted...
...James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New Criterion, and The American Spectator's movie critic...
...But as someone else observes, it's also dear to the hearts of funnymen because "it's a joke about the sweet old days of show business"—the days when no comedian in his right mind would dream of telling it before an audience and it could only be told to other comedians, "after the headmaster went home...
...Directed by Paul Provenza and produced by Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller, it consists of little apart from successive iterations of the same dirty joke by a Who's Who of Englishlanguage comedic talent...
...Yet in the end we are meant to see the gung-ho attitude of the winning coach, played by Greg Kinnear, as being much more disreputable...
...The comparison in the film is with jazz: the melody is nothing, the improvisation everything...
...Billy Bob Thornton's character in Bad News Bears, another movie that opened recently, violates the new taboos by smoking, drinking, and cursing around the Little Leaguers he coaches and endangering their health and safety by exploiting their labor in his exterminating business...
...Certainly, neither makes very much sense in artistic terms without the other...
...But the film doesn't go very far down this road...
...A man walks into the office of a theatrical agent to sell him an act...
...That means that—also like the superego and the id—to some extent they depend on each other...
...There's a come-on to quicken the pulse...
...But to a comedian it is what Shakespeare's sonnets are to a poet, namely the purest expression of his craft—because both the sonnets and the joke are all form with a mini-mum of distraction from the content...
Vol. 38 • September 2005 • No. 7
