By Tom Bradley.
This is the introduction to The Aristocrats Joke Anthology (Potter’s Grove Press, 2023).
Say you’re a writer (everybody says so nowadays), and you aspire to sign a Mephistophelean contract with a major literary agent, because you hanker after a lucrative Big Five contract and assorted fornication partners.
If your pitch passes the marketability muster, you will be assigned to a Stylist, whose job is to comb through your “property” (the major agent doesn’t bother) and compel you to remove anything that might be offensive. All your previous publications must also be scrutinized, and, if anything is found to be potentially hurtful toward members of marginalized communities, you can kiss off representation. (And here you thought style referred to the effective arrangement, rather than the socialization, of words.)
Your vaguely floating sense of righteousness is piqued. You contort your brain in an effort to be sensitive to the needs of that clan of polymeliac hypospadial gerontophile albino latahs who live next door. Castigate from your text, or replace with approved euphemisms, every one of those five prejudicial terms, and many more besides, or resign yourself to being the most contemptible specimen crawling across the lit-scape: an un-agented author.
Your Stylist is a drill sergeant in what is tritely called, by reactionaries and bourgeois liberals alike, The Culture War. Regardless of who uses the term, the phenomenon’s true purpose is to distract the citizenry from more problematic struggles—let’s say, for example, the prodding of Putin with an existential threat, eliciting the expected reaction, thus giving our leadership an excuse to reduce his country (formerly the Third Reich’s projected breadbasket) to the status of a puppet state; and this being the first stage of a pincer maneuver on China, ultimately to neutralize that particular twenty percent of humanity, so greasy oligarchic cunts like Musk, Gates and Bezos can establish a unipolar global hegemony, bequeath everything to their hideous offspring, and spawn a permanent, all-powerful hereditary caste of the assholes who comprise the punchline of the book you presently hold in your hands.
“Be distracted by none of that,” barks your Stylist. “There are identities to be affirmed, lifestyles to be upheld, feathers to be unruffled—more than enough to engage your energies as you busily emasculate your sentences.”
Of course, the one force that could counter the Empire’s planetary power grab (apart from a nine-mile-wide asteroid) would be a radicalized international proletariat—a looming prospect dreaded by the muckety-mucks far more than the nukes whose hair triggers they’re twiddling in Ukraine and Taiwan. And herein lies the second front in the Culture War. It’s in the plutocracy’s best interests that race, religion, genital configuration, erotic orientation, and so forth, should be lifted above material class relations as the crack in society’s chappy ass.
“So hop to it,” snaps your Stylist in bossy tones. “You writers are expected to do your bit as passive propagandists.”
Writers are not necessarily overly stupid people, and we’re aware of what’s afoot on both the domestic and international fronts. We know the pimps whom we’re begging to turn us out like whores are not “literary” at all, but agents of tyranny, hot war, genocide, and all the other inevitabilities of late-stage capitalism. But, being mere creatures of a day, and subject to the usual human appetites, we crave personal fame as a substitute for the self-respect that the free enterprise system fails to provide. We grovel for the balm of approbation to be rubbed on the thin-skinned blisters bubbling over our narcissistic egos. Hence the need to puff up our curricula vitae with book publications, and the eagerness to submit to the rigors of our Stylist.
The latter functionary, intimately familiar with these weaknesses of ours, and professionally adept at playing off them, decides to cut the bullshit, and begins to lecture us as follows:
“Fuck the Donbas Region (wherever that is); fuck NATO and its frontline garrison states; fuck, eventually, all of Europe, West no less than East; fuck Taipei, Beijing and the entire Asia-Pacific region, all the way to Down-Under. Fuck humanity in general (a.k.a. ‘superfluous feeders’) and their radiosensitive gene pool. Closer to home, fuck the ever-pullulating multitudes of weary hoboes founding cardboard megalopolises in your city’s outskirts. Pay attention, instead, to the task at hand. Like the intelligentsia co-opted by Oceania’s Ministry of Truth to slim down the Newspeak lexicon, you’ve got lingo to rectify, kid.”
By the time we’re done getting stylized, we’re flat on the floor, face down. Stripped of the means to pursue our vocation, we resemble pianists barred from the white keys, or painters disallowed tubes of cobalt blue. Our vocabularies have been plundered, our pronouns mutilated like something from a body horror flick. And we’re loathing ourselves for the prim and proper pussies we’ve been turned into: de-fanged, de-clawed, spayed like lap dogs, lobotomized, tranquilized—in other words, marketable authors.
After what seems like years swooning in sore-assed despair, we somehow manage to raise our humiliated heads—and what do we see? Whom do we hear?
A stand-up comic telling a certain joke.
Grandparent rape. Toddler defilement. This First Amendment champion is luxuriating in the sorts of pleasures denied us rolled-over print bitches.
Penetration of unfamiliar orifices. Pet dismemberment. Diarrhea antics. We undergo spasms of hero-worshipfulness for this fearless comedian.
Corpse dallying. Cannibalistic barf swaps. And, most delectable of all, insensitive language. (None of which, admittedly, goes especially far toward extricating mankind from the political and economic predicaments adumbrated above—but who cares? Triggers are being pulled, and it makes us gleeful.)
As we witness this clown delivering his routine, we are overwhelmed with penis envy (in the psychoanalytical, pre-operative sense). How can we not suffer pangs of regret at having wasted our lives pursuing the wrong art form?
But, suddenly, before the dreaded suicidal ideations can take root, an aspect of our congenital makeup surfaces, something that has been forgotten since we grabbed ankles for our Stylist. An urge, a metabolic imperative, reasserts itself in our physiopsyches. No more deniable than the need to drink water and breathe air, it’s the reason we were born, and is known, in some quarters, as talent. It manifests as the determination to express ourselves fully, with written words, without restraints.
But what if our Stylist should get wind of this ambition? We’ll be set adrift to flounder in slush piles.
People in all times and places, faced with insoluble dilemmas, have often had recourse to recondite remedies. In our case, a syncretic stew of Jewish occultism, subcontinental mysticism and Teutonic hocus-pocus is indicated: namely, the terrible and mighty procedure known as gilgul among Talmudic scholars, avatarship among Hindus and Esoteric Hitlerists, and boddhistatvic overshadowing among Mahayana Buddhists.
For example, Elijah is said to have gilgulled John the Baptist, while bestial, red-hairy Esau overshadowed Ben-Panthera, alias Jesus Christ. Savitri Devi considered her beloved Esoterische Führer to be Vishnu’s tenth avatar. And let’s not forget the downright train Aleister Crowley pulled: Pope Alexander VI, Crop-Eared Kelley, Cagliostro, Eliphas Levi—a regular bodhisattvic bucket brigade.
So, here might be a way for us to come on like a stand-up comic, to have it both ways, to retain value in the crass marketplace while exercising a little artistic integrity on the side. In trying to encompass the feat of reconciling our carnal appetites with our divine gifts, let’s suffer excarnate spirits to squat inside our bodies, nom de plume-wise, magically shifting blame for the thought-crime we’re fixing to commit. Thus possessed, we can broach touchy topics (“touchy” in the uncomfortable sense, minus the –feelie). We can wallow in the sorts of offensiveness that will make the most seasoned Stylist clutch her bodice and swoon. And it won’t be our fault.
What else but incorrectness can be expected from the shady likes of Dante, the Marquis de Sade, H.P. Lovecraft, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, William Burroughs, Hunter Thompson, and so forth? Such are some of the unquiet spirits whose evidence appears on the pages below, as extruded from pens only incidentally clutched in our fingers. These guys wrote before the present enlightened age, and were never brought to heel by Stylists. Even Lewis Carroll, also on our table of contents, has been deemed too funny an uncle for twenty-first-century girlies.
So what follows are the sounds of political correctness prisoners, spitting out their ball gags for the moment, and replacing them with masks. The screams you hear will be full-throated; but, emitted by literary artists, they’ll be modulated with solid discipline, and will adhere to the basic structure of that certain joke, mentioned above, which has been accommodating endless variation and bottomless exacerbation since vaudeville days.
An entertainer is pitching a sordid series of transgressive behaviors to an impresario, who eventually asks, “What is the name of your act?”
“The Aristocrats!”
This anthology is dedicated to the memory of Gilbert Gottfried, who brought the Aristocrats Joke out of the smoke-filled green rooms of comedy clubs and into the full illumination of public discourse. Royalties are going to Comedy Gives Back, our favorite charity for washed-up comics.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Bradley is the author of numerous novels, essays, and short stories.
