All in the Delivery

Paul Provenza (l) and Penn Jillette

People on Penn Jillette's shit list: Martin Scorsese ("Okay, you know what, Taxi Driver, he got lucky, and everything else just sucked ... it's one of those: Everybody says he's great, so he must be"); Scorsese's muse, Robert De Niro ("the worst actor in the world ... there's never been a worse actor; he did a couple of good movies, and we pretend he's a good actor, whereas Bruce Willis, because he came from TV, everyone thinks he does a good job, but he can't be considered a good actor"); Don Johnson (should the situation ever present itself, avoid him backstage at a concert, as it will "make you want to put a bullet in your fucking head").

People not on Penn Jillette's shit list (besides Willis): comedians.

"We made The Aristocrats really for ourselves, and we made it for the people in the movie. It's just kinda like this little yearbook for people who were around and this love letter to the culture of comedy, to comedy and to comedians," says the 50-year-old magician-performer-actor-writer-raconteur-new-father and, now, "camera operator" of the documentary he and director Paul Provenza conceived. "We did this project that was in our spare time, truly a hobby, like having a beehive out back or something, working on it for four-and-a-half years. I really had this feeling that Provenza and I – in comparing Gilbert Gottfried to Miles Davis, you know, and talking about improvisation and kind of the minutiae and nuances of comedy, actually looking at what that means and dealing with it, really, as seriously and pretentiously as you could possibly deal with comedy – could compare notes with people who had more than a passing interest in it.

"Forgive me for trying to be objective while being self-aggrandizing," he adds, "but what I love about The Aristocrats is the fact that it has a clarity of passion. One of the things that I find seems to be grabbing people as they come out is the purity of idea."

And impurity of content. The joyous, raucous, unrated film is 89 minutes of a hundred comedians telling the same ridiculously dirty joke in their own ridiculously different ways – "The Aristocrats" joke, as it were, a staple among stand-ups. A fundamental building block in the effort to induce laughter while also greatly offending. A rite of passage ready-made for one-upmanship.

The subtle, skillful film is also ridiculously original and, as you might imagine, ridiculously entertaining. And – among viewers who might not care to sip from the potent cocktail of, say, a family slipping and sliding around in their own excrement; family (or group, if you prefer) sex with any and all of God's creatures; the familial bodily fluids involved in said sex; inanimate objects in unenviable positions among family members; and/or much, much more – it has proven to be ridiculously controversial. At a midnight screening during South by Southwest, five people (who looked like they might constitute a family, weirdly) walked out. There have been many more before and since. More notably, AMC Entertainment has refused to present the film in its theatres.

"The film company and the PR people really want to play that up, and I have been stopping them, because I'm the one doing the interviews," Jillette says. "I've been fucking up their grand plan. My attitude has been that nobody should walk out of this movie, because we should make it very clear what it is: Our friends are invited, the people that get it, and those that don't get it, they should go see the penguin movie. They really should. I love the penguin movie.

"You know, my sister, she's 23 years older than me, she's a little old lady in New England. She's seen everything I've ever done. I couldn't love anybody more. We are so close, you can't believe it. She's not seeing the movie. And that's the proof that I don't think that if you don't see this movie you're stupid or you're unhip or I don't dig you or you're a right-wing crazy. It just means maybe you don't like this movie. But we have 104 of the funniest people in the world. We're in this room and we're telling dirty jokes and they're really dirty and they're really bothersome. We're having a blast. If you wanna come in, sit around, you're welcome to. If you don't wanna, that's OK. The room is crowded enough."