This comedy won't be remembered for its shocking language. What marks it as a turning point in comedy is the fact that it features a mime with comedic talent. Steven Banks is his name. An earlier review mentioned that an audience of industry insiders in Easthampton, Long Island, while laughing at the rest of the movie, stayed silent during this part. I think this is because the audience at that showing was afraid to laugh, mimes having become pariahs around 1980, when every drama school couple took the subway to Penn Station and stood outside trying to be artistic clowns. But the mime in THE ARISTOCRATS upstaged everybody else. The audience I saw it with laughed when he was on. (This was at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, Long Island, whose patrons are PARENTS of industry insiders.) I'm willing to entertain the notion that I do not have a sense of humor, but my inability to laugh at most of this is not due to the fact that these comics weren't being funny, but that the editing prevented their tellings of the joke from going at their own pace. Do what you want with the camera, but don't cut the pauses the comedians have inserted. You ruin the comedian's intended effect. Some of the participants appear to have been ambushed. Jon Stewart, sitting in his dressing-room being made up, is one of the few here who seems to sense that this is cinematic onanism. After joking a little ABOUT the joke, he gracefully refuses to tell it.) Everybody else, with the exception of George Carlin and Steven Banks, seems to be at a loss. The camera is up in their face. Here you have highly skilled comics trying to do what they know they can do, but something's wrong. It's as if, at a party, a friend says to you, "Tell that one you told at lunch." You start telling the joke and somebody says, "Hey, we should put this on the camcorder." You wait ten minutes while they search though the trunk of somebody's car to get the camcorder. Somebody has to drive to the drug store and get batteries. Then, with the pizza getting cold and the guests getting a little antsy, you have to tell the joke that's supposed to be so great in front of a camera held an inch from your face. The laugh's on somebody. But that person's on the cutting-room floor.
Review of The Aristocrats
