SECRET Me, Myself, and I saw The Aristocrats at the Esquire on Friday afternoon. Ah, the pleasures of an empty movie theater! No cell phones ringing, no irritating conversations, no one kicking the back of your seat. Bliss! I found myself dreaming of owning my own movie theater some day. Would it be an art-deco movie palace? Or would I try something smaller and more intimate. Perhaps a theater in a bar, as the owner of the Ginger Man and I once discussed? Something secret, a speak-easy upstairs? You tell the bartender that you're looking for some interesting mise-en-scene or some good deep focus and he directs you to what looks like a storage closet in the back of the bar.

Anyhoots, The Aristocrats is a documentary about the ultimate comedian in-joke. The joke goes something like this: A man walks into a talent agency, asking to describe his act. The agent tells him that he has five minutes. The act consists of the man and his family, usually a wife, two children, and occasionally grandparents, performing sexual and scatological depravities upon each other. The man describes these shocking deeds at length and in excruciating detail. The stunned agent then asks the man what he calls the act, and the man replies with innocent aplomb, "The Aristocrats!"

The basic joke is mildly amusing, but what matters most, the film keeps reminding us, is not the joke itself, but how it's open to thousands of different interpretations and improvisations. Apparently, comedians have entertained each other for decades with different tellings of the joke; as one talking head says, it's like their secret handshake.

The Aristocrats is a pleasant-enough film, but nothing more. Some of the tellings of the joke, by Kevin Pollak, Mario Cantone, Eric Cartman, and Eric Mead, are very funny. Revealingly, (for me, at least,) these were interpretations of the joke that added something else beyond the incest and shit that most of the others comedians relied on. It's not that I think that sex and bodily functions aren't funny, it's just that after you've heard a dozen versions of the joke in that vein, it gets a bit numbing.

While I had a good time watching The Aristocrats, I left feeling curiously dissatisfied. The film doesn't do much beyond presenting different versions of the joke with commentary by various comics. At the risk of sounding stuffy, I would have like a little more depth or context to the film. There's an attempt to explore the psychology of the joke, but it's brief and not that interesting. How about a little more about the sub-culture of comics or an examination of what bad taste means? If this joke is so funny, is everything else fair game? Actually, I think that the main reason the Aristocrats doesn't quite work for me is that the joke really isn't so offensive. It's almost fable-like in its lack of specificity. All we have is a family doing these awful things to each other. It's disgusting, sure, but that's all. Nothing ties the joke to the real world, and consequently, it lacks bite.  ¶ 9:19 AM