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The New York Times
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March 13, 2005

FRANK RICH

The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told

T was two and half weeks after 9/11 that I heard the dirtiest joke I'd ever heard in my life.
New York was still tossing and turning under its blanket of grief back then. Almost no one
was going out at night to have fun, a word that had been banished from the country's
vocabulary. But desperately sad people will do desperate things. That's my excuse for
making my way with my wife to the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, where the Friars Club was
roasting Hugh Hefner.

Someone had decided that the show must go on. A crowd materialized out of nowhere to
pack a vast ballroom in an otherwise shadowy and deserted Midtown. On the dais were
not only the expected clowns old (Alan King) and young (Jimmy Kimmel) but a surreal
grab bag of celebrities out of Madame Tussauds: Dr. Joyce Brothers, Ice-T, Patty Hearst,
Donald Trump. "God Bless America" was sung by Deborah Harry.

The ensuing avalanche of Viagra jokes did not pull off the miracle of making everyone in
the room forget the recent events. Restlessness had long since set in when the last comic
on the bill, Gilbert Gottfried, took the stage. Mr. Gottfried, decked out in preposterously
ill-fitting formal wear, has a manic voice so shrill he makes Jerry Lewis sound like Morgan
Freeman. He grabbed the podium for dear life and started rocking back and forth like a
hyperactive teenager trapped onstage in a school assembly. Soon he delivered what may
have been the first public 9/11 gag: He couldn't get a direct flight to California, he said,
because "they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first."

There were boos, but Mr. Gottfried moved right along to his act's crowning joke. "A
talent agent is sitting in is office," he began. "A family walks in - a man, woman, two kids,
and their little dog. And the talent agent goes, 'What kind of an act do you do?' " What
followed was a marathon description of a vaudeville routine featuring incest, bestiality and
almost every conceivable bodily function. The agent asks the couple the name of their
unusual act, and their answer is the punch line: "The Aristocrats."

As the mass exodus began, some people were laughing, others were appalled, and perhaps
a majority of us were in the middle. We knew we had seen something remarkable, not
because the joke was so funny but because it had served as shock therapy, harmless shock
therapy for an adult audience, that at least temporarily relieved us of our burdens and
jolted us back into the land of the living again. Some weeks later Comedy Central would

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