By Peter Landau

Guy walks into a talent agent's office. Says he's got a great family act. Let's hear it, says the agent, and he's then blindsided by a spew of obscenity so foul it'd make Hugh Hefner blanch, which it did when Gilbert Gottfried told his version of the classic vaudevillian dirty joke at the Friar's Club roast for the Playboy publisher during the humorless days after the attacks on New York City on September 11, 2001.

That performance is documented in Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza's documentary The Aristocrats, which is also the punch line to the joke. What's the name of the act? The Aristocrats! The movie is the exception that proves the rule that trying to explain a joke ruins it. Here, the more the funnymen detail their perverse fantasies, the greater the yuks--and yucks.

Penn Jillette, the large and loud half of the magical act Penn & Teller, sat down with Mr. Skin to discuss not only the genesis of his movie and dirty jokes, but expose his own love of onscreen nudity, Russ Meyer, and the old and truly obscene Times Square.

When did you first hear the Aristocrats joke?
It's one of those things I feel I've always known, though that can't be true. I believe it was Gilbert Gottfried. The only telling that I remember vividly was Gilbert Gottfried. I may have known it before then, but his telling blew me away.

At the Friar's roast?
No, no, no, much before then. We started The Aristocrats project before the Friar's roast happened. It wasn't inspired by that. As a matter of fact it may be the other way around. We shot Gilbert about six weeks beforehand. That may have helped put it in his mind.

Do you have a favorite version of it?
The joke doesn't matter. It's the singer, not the song. In the movie, I love Taylor Negron's version where he goes from abstract to concrete. All of a sudden he's really talking about sex. There's a great creepy and beautiful moment when that happens. Gilbert, I think, is the most pure skilled. I love how Paul Reiser comments on the joke while making fun of commenting on the joke. I love Wendy Liebman just turning it 180. Of course, Billy the Mime is a pretty special thing.

What didn't make it into the film, and will it be on the DVD?
The first version I saw of The Aristocrats, edited, was two hours and twenty minutes, and every single thing that Provenza cut out shouldn't have been cut out. Cutting down to eighty-seven or eighty-nine is because that's the rules to make a movie that way. Nothing should have been cut. There's 140 hours of footage, or somewhere around there. If the movie is successful enough, which means it has to be pretty damn successful, I would like to do a real Aristocrats project with that wonderful tone spread out for hours.

A couple of the movies you've been in are on our site--Tough Guys Don't Dance and Hackers--which leads me to ask if you remember growing up the first time you saw a nude scene in a mainstream movie?
Oh, that's so important! I went to see Last Summer, and Barbara Hershey came on the screen with her top off (Picture: 1). I think it has to be one of the most sexual moments of my life. It was the first time I saw naked breasts moving, and I was out of my fucking mind it was so sexy.

I have a horrible story on that. We were playing off-Broadway and Barbara Hershey came to our show. I said to her after the show--she was very sweet, very nice, unbelievably sexy--I said to her, "The sexiest thing in my life was seeing you in Last Summer." And I said, "Forever, the archetypical breasts for me, you know full hard-on producing thing, is you topless in that movie. I'm still insane from it." I said, "I was just a kid." When I said, "a kid," I realized I was telling her she was much older than me. It was this horrible insult that I still feel terrible about.

Upon doing research I have found that I didn't see it when I was that young. It came out when I was sixteen and she shot it when she was sixteen or seventeen [more like twenty or twenty-one -- ed.]. We were the same age, but my phrasing made it seem like I was twelve and she was twenty. That was rude and a shame, because I think she's so gorgeous and so sexy. But then she married a very, very rich guy and she's much happier than she ever would have been fucking me.

Isn't that always the case, sexual moments are the best and the worst thing wrapped up in one?
No! What are you talking about? How high are you? Sexual moments are usually just the fucking best. This was not a sexual moment. This was talking to a woman in the lobby. If I had my cock in her, worst wouldn't enter into it.

Our editorial director remembers hearing you on the Howard Stern show years ago, and when asked who you thought was the sexiest person in movies, you said Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. But do you have a favorite female screen siren?
This is the funny thing: from what clicks me there are really no actresses that set me off. It's all actors. There's a great line by Elvis Costello, "They're making heroes out of fall guys, it's damn good for business." Once you've met Don Johnson there's nothing else that can go through your head. This idea that losers are paraded as superstars, I find it really bothersome. With women it's much worse. They either do the symbolic she's-really-strong thing or they do this horrible weak thing. It doesn't work for me.

I would have to say, however, all that being said, Jennifer Tilly. I love Jennifer Tilly because she's smarter than fuck. I love that she plays stupid and plays it badly. And there's something so cool about that. My friend Eddie Gorodetsky, Fat Eddie G who's in The Aristocrats, once said to me, "Your ideal woman never leaves the trailer park except to go to the Mensa meetings." It's really true.

I always lament this, that the people that other guys whack off to in movies, like ... I don't even know their names. Tom Cruise's ex ... ?

Nicole Kidman.
Nicole Kidman? I wouldn't fuck her with your dick.

You can, I wouldn't complain.
But there's this funny thing that happened when Blondie first came out and I saw Debbie Harry. There was nothing at all sexy about her. She just seemed like this fake, baby-doll phony. I didn't get it. And I met Debbie Harry in person, and she was one of the sexiest people I ever met in my life. When she's on film it's this stripped-down image. When there's all of her, and there's all that intelligence and power and talent, it's overwhelming. Just grabbed my heart and grabbed my dick, which kills me. But when it gets put in a movie, I think the problem is I don't find the filmmakers sexy. It doesn't work at all.

But Malcolm McDowell, I would still say in Clockwork Orange that character is so fucking dangerous and sexy. I just don't think there's a woman in film that can touch it.

I understand one of your Manhattan haunts is the Howard Johnson's in Times Square. Is it still open?
It closed two weeks ago. All my friends were there.

Over the years, from those windows, what a parade of perversity could be witnessed. Did you frequent the theaters of 42nd Street back in its exploitation heyday?
Yeah, sure, I was not a Hubert's [Dime Museum] guy, which I consider to be the heyday, because that stopped when I was too young. In the '80s, I went to a lot of places. I went to Show World in its heyday. I went to all those places, and I had friends who worked there. I thought it was really sexy and wonderful. Obscenity, I mean truly offensive things, is having Disney on the Deuce. It's one of the saddest moments in American history.

Besides massage parlors, did you frequent the exploitation triple-features on 42nd Street?
I did not go to the massage parlors. I went to some nude-dancing places because I had women that I was intimate with that were working there. The blaxploitation films I really enjoyed. Larry Cohen. Blacula. That sort of thing, though I don't think I saw it on the first runaround. I was a little bit too young. I've always liked them, Hell Up in Harlem and stuff. I tried really hard to be a kung-fu fan and never really made it. I ended up with Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, some of the original stuff like that. When you get more obscure, when you get beyond Jet Li, I kind of fall apart there.

The sexual exploitation stuff, the Russ Meyer stuff, I'm too young for. But the second, third time around I just adored it. Everything that can be said about Russ Meyer Malcolm McLaren said so well when he did The Great Rock n' Roll Swindle. I love the fact that Russ Meyer once said that if you gave him the chance to fuck a flat-chested woman he'd rather play poker [laughs]. But I've had a lot of fun fucking flat-chested women, so don't get me wrong.

You're a famous skeptic and debunker of quackery ...
Yup, there's a lot of fake nudity on the web.

Do you believe there is a real Mr. Skin?
I never even considered there'd be a real Mr. Skin.

There is.
I thought he was like Betty Crocker--though there was a real Betty Crocker!


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