The Aristocrats (2005): Netflixin 11/22/08

• Why I rented it: I had never heard the joke before. It must be a doozy, right?

• Verdict: 2/10. Thanks to this movie, I can now proudly boast to my friends that I've heard it 100 times! And it's soooo hilarious! Ha! Ha! Ha! See, the fact that I find it funny makes me cool, in some sort of insider hipster sophisticated way! Cooler than all of you guys! Ha! Ha! Ha! I get it!

Ok I'm better now. The comedians, comics or whatever they want to be called who appear in this movie have apparently become so numbed to joke-telling over the course of their careers that they no longer find funny things funny. Instead, they enjoy ad-libbing. And probing the deepest pits of their minds to find the filthiest, most shocking, most disgusting sequence of events they can come up with and making it part of a joke. Kind of like taking every scatological joke you heard between the third and fifth grades and mixing them with the juiciest passages of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. Voila! Hilarity ensues!

The moral of this story is this: if you're going to make an hour-and-a-half movie about one freaking joke, the joke had dang well better be funny.