A friend of mine and I wanted to go to the movies, but we couldn't agree on what to see. In a gesture of compromise, my friend said, "I know a great film. You'll love it."

Well, I was intrigued, so I asked him to tell me a little about the movie.

My friend says, well, it's an oddly engaging film, and overall, it is a quite insightful 90 minutes. You see, the film is basically a documentary about a particular joke. It's a movie of mostly interviews with comedians and comedy writers talking about their exposure to this particular joke and its various tellings.

He goes, yeah, so it starts with George Carlin talking about this particular joke. And you learn right away that it's one that comedians tell, mostly among themselves, to entertain other comedians or to top each other's version. The idea of the joke is to be as filthy and raunchy and disgusting as the imagination will allow. There are no taboos that the teller is forbidden to include; the more shocking it is, the better.

He says, unfortunately, the camera is too close to Carlin's face, and no make-up or special lighting is used for the documentary, and the lines and pits in Carlin's skin detract from the number of times he says "fuck" and "shit". But this disgust factor is there for many of the stars who appear, and one wonders if that was done to purposely stay in tune with the raunchiness of the joke.

But anyway, says my friend, an old vaudeville historian named Jay Marshall delivers the joke in one or two sentences, so the uninitiated viewer understands the basic setup and punchline, and the movie no doubt progresses more smoothly for those folks from that point.

He says, there's a lot more to it, however, as it becomes clear quickly that the idea for the teller is to take the simple vaudeville joke, and use it as a blank canvas to create an improvisational masterpiece, whereby a tapestry of filth and degradation is woven into the build-up of the joke, lending the perfect contrast to the punchline, which quite frankly turns out to be somewhat weak. But that's all part of the fun, he says. The creativity, and indeed the big laughs are all in the joke's setup, and each comic works the setup like a jazz musician, improvising what is often a scatological stream of consciousness for several minutes until ultimately coming back around to deliver the punchline. No two tellings are ever the same.

He tells me that Penn Jillette of the Penn & Teller magic duo is one of the executive producers along with comedian Paul Provenza who also directs, and aside from a couple of quick clips of Penn & Teller being sanctimonious about their exposure to the joke, and the occasional off-camera guffaw, the executive producers are thankfully absent from the film. After all, one is a stand up who achieved marginal success at best, and the other is a one-time juggler who now in effect, plays boisterous straight man for a much more talented magician. So their versions of the sliding in shit and the fist fucking grandma would no doubt fall extremely short of the high marks set by some of the featured comics.

He goes on to say that Gilbert Gottfried's version of the joke performed at the Hugh Hefner Friar's Club Roast shortly after 9/11 is the inspiration for the documentary. He says it came at a time when even the comics weren't sure if they should be laughing yet, and there are some poignant moments where the humanity of a group of people who are normally seen as jaded and cynical shine through. The comedians seem genuinely touched and grateful to Gottfried for rallying them at such a dark time. Unfortunately, the film doesn't include an uncut version of what many comics say is the best telling of the joke they'd ever heard. Still, Gottfried's pinched face, and perfectly exaggerated delivery, turn the choruses of "fucking and sucking" into some of the film's biggest laughs.

My friend then tells me that one by one, the comics both talk about the joke and/or perform their versions using probably the most interesting technique of the film. The interviews appear to be unrehearsed and conducted with a single take, giving the viewer a good feel for what it might be like to cavort with comics backstage at a comedy club or to just hang out with them at a restaurant. The technique also wonderfully exposes the improvisational nature of the joke, as many versions of the joke throughout the film are obviously done off-the-cuff.

Then he goes, it's great when Larry Storch, looking like the Crypt Keeper, does the joke, spelling out the incest and ass fucking, and bestiality with a genteel English accent. Howie Mandel reminisces about his grandmother telling him of the skating in shit and the cunt fisting. Phyllis Diller, looking like bones in a dried up wrinkled old bag, waxes nostalgic about not being able to do the joke in the old days because dog fucking wasn't a permitted topic. Sara Silverman describes working a room as the ass-licker of her brother and father. There's a mime sodomizing a baby. Bob Saget rhapsodizes about an eye socket being fucked. Jugglers light severed elephant penises on fire and juggle them while fellating grandpa. Robin Williams, Billy Connolly, Andy Dick, Susie Essman, Dana Gould, Dom Irrera, Whoopi Goldberg, Kevin Pollack, Eddie Izzard, and a host of other comics, actors, and comedy writers daisy chain, shit onstage, skate in vomit, slather menses on crackers and eat them with ejaculate, slap tits, shit in old ladies' mouths, fuck corpses, serve maggots in an ice cream cone, pull the foreskins of old men over their heads like helmets, eat the assholes out of rabid rhinos, and fist tight boil-laden asses while tonguing the pus-filled polyps until they break open and bleed.

I said, that sounds like a movie worth seeing. What's it called?

He says, it's called "The Aristocrats".