Site Meter Reflections on Playboy: I’m not shocked to see Hef shocked

July 17, 2006

I’m not shocked to see Hef shocked

For 90 solid minutes of gloriously filthy humor, see last year’s documentary film The Aristocrats. A hundred or so professional comedians tell numerous versions of a joke they’ve traditionally told only each other since the days of vaudeville. Told competently, it’s an improvisational tour de force of every disgusting abomination you can imagine. Three fourths into the film, Gilbert Gottfried is seen telling it at the New York Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner on September 29, 2001. Having alienated his audience with ill-timed jokes about 9/11, Gottfried redeems himself by choosing to offend in a different way. Some of his fellow comedians fall on the floor laughing. But not Hefner, according to Steven Winn’s review for the San Francisco Chronicle:
As the camera flips back and forth from Gottfried at the Friars Club podium and an audience ecstatically unhinged by his delivery, it keeps catching a stony-faced Hefner on the dais. There he is, the man who rode the First Amendment to a fortune with his Playboy philosophy and anything-goes centerfolds, profoundly unamused. It’s a telling juxtaposition and a perfect coda for The Aristocrats. Free speech isn’t easy and it isn’t comfortable. It may not make you smile. It can certainly make you squirm. It’s dangerous and risky, and it sure doesn’t give a fig about bad taste. That’s what makes it matter and what makes it free.
Hefner doesn’t exactly do the Queen Victoria impression that Winn suggests—he’s a good sport, chuckling a bit in spite of himself—but he is visibly shocked. And why not? Thomas Moore’s 1998 book The Soul of Sex identifies the comically grotesque phallic god Priapus as the ruling spirit of dirty jokes:
...Anyone who has ever heard a stand-up comic knows something about the way Priapic humor pokes fun at high-minded society: pratfalls, crotch grabbing, mooning, and jokes about the sex organs. Some people are entertained by such bawdy humor and some are offended, and both are proper responses to this divine freak....

The soul of sex reaches beyond the taste of any one of us, and so we have to enter what may be unfamiliar and uncomfortable ground if we are going to get a sense of it. The rigid moralist has to relax his habit of judging, and the libertine has to find it in himself to be offended. One gets the sense sometimes that sex educators would like to enlighten us so thoroughly that shame would disappear and we would become completely comfortable with every aspect of sex. Maybe sex should always be uncomfortable in some areas. Like religion, sex is tremendum et fascinans, incredibly alluring and yet at the same time overwhelming in its sheer vitality and emotional power. Sometimes it may offend our dignity because it is more than human, not less. (p. 118-120)
If you’ve seen the movie, I invite you to write your own version of the joke as a comment on this post. Let the filth fly.

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Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 3:57 PM

  • Blogger Brian Sorgatz left this comment at July 17, 2006 4:05 PM  
    I’ll start:

    A guy walks into a talent agent’s office and says, “I’ve got a terrific act for you. I walk onstage with my wife, my son, and my daughter. We go into the audience, round up all the immigrants, Jews, niggers, faggots, cripples, and retards among them, and drag them up to the stage against their will. Then we burn their genitals and nipples with blowtorches, recording their screams on a free CD for every surviving, racially pure member of the audience.”

    The agent, obviously another sick, satanic fuck, doesn’t call the police. Instead, he asks the name of the act.

    The guy says, “The Fine and Dandies.”

  • Blogger Scarlett left this comment at July 17, 2006 11:45 PM  
    I'm not sure what to say about the comment here - but your blog caught my eye because I started reading Playboy when I was a little girl and weird as it may sound, I have fond memories of it. Don't read it anymore.

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