5 Dirty Jokes That Are As Clever As They Are Obscene

5 Gilbert Gottfried Turned to Smut to Dig Himself Out of a Hole

“The Aristocrats” is more of a rite of passage than it is a proper joke. Since the vaudeville era, boundary-pushing performers have told a similar story in three parts:

• Part 1: A family of performers approaches a talent agent looking for work.
• Part 2: The family describes their performance, which consists of the grossest, darkest, most depraved acts known to humankind.
• Part 3: The bewildered talent agent asks what the name of the group is, and it’s always “The Aristocrats.”

It takes a skilled comedian to draw the joke out as long as possible, adding more and more disgusting phrases never before uttered by a human mouth, building up the tension and discomfort to supernatural levels. George Carlin, Chris Rock and Robin Williams have all had their way with this joke, but Gottfried delivered one of the most memorable versions of all time. He unleashed his signature barrage of indecency at the 2001 Friars’ Club roast of Hugh Hefner: 

• Part 1: “The talent agent goes, ‘So what kind of act do you do?’ The father starts taking his shirt and jacket off. The mother starts taking her blouse off. Pretty soon, all of them are completely naked including the dog, who takes his leash off…”
• Part 2: (I would be fired and arrested for typing any of this).
• Part 3: “So they’re covered with piss and shit and blood and cum and sweat, ooh, that sweat. And the talent agent says, ‘What do you call yourselves?’ And the father sticks his chest out and goes, ‘The Aristocrats.’”

The key to comedy, as we all know, is timing. And the timing of Gottfried’s diatribe is what jacks it up to legendary status. He had just gotten loudly booed by the entire room for a tasteless 9/11 joke, 18 days after the attacks, and decided on the fly to save his act with The Aristocrats.

4 George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words

I wanted to cover Lenny Bruce for this entry, but the more I learn about the acts that got him in trouble, the less I feel like “clever” is the right word for his work. He was arrested multiple times, for saying stuff like “cocksucker,” “cum” and “schmuck.” There’s no denying he was very brave to directly, repeatedly challenge obscenity laws. But he was also arrested for shit like impersonating a priest to raise money for (or more accurately, steal money from) leprosy hospitals. 

So let’s turn to his protege, George Carlin, who was on at least one occasion arrested right alongside Bruce. Where Bruce blasted off bad words like a bazooka, Carlin’s profanity was more like a sniper rifle. 

His appreciation for and understanding of the darker corners of the English language are on full display in his all-time banger, “The Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV”: “Words are all we have, really. We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid, y’know like, woo woo woo woo, POP! Then we assign a word to a thought and we’re stuck with that word for that thought, so be careful with words.”

He names them repeatedly, almost like he’s toasting to them: “Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.”

Then he artfully dances with them, carving gorgeous phrases out of the English language like Michaelangelo unleashing a figure from stone:

• “Cheese Tits, Corn Tits, Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits, Onion Tits, Tater Tits. ‘Betcha Can’t Eat Just One!’”
• “You can prick your finger but don’t finger your prick.”
• “Okay you fuckers, I’m going to tinkle now.”

3 Eddy Murphy Inspired a Wildly Popular Horror Movie

There’s no way he could have known it, but one bit in Murphy’s iconic 1983 stand-up film Delirious would inspire some dweeb from MadTV to make one of the best horror films of the 21st century. 

Murphy had an epiphany while watching Poltergeist: “Why don’t white people just leave the house when there’s a ghost in the house?” He goes on to describe how it would go down at the police station on night one: “Look man, I went home and my fucking daughter’s in the TV set, and I just fucking left. You can have all this, I ain’t going back to the motherfucker. I just came down so when she ain’t at the school you don’t think I killed the bitch or anything like that. But she is inside the TV set, you can have all that shit. Thank you.”

“Mr. Murphy, didn’t you try to save your daughter?”

“Yeah, I’m a man, I tried to save her. I turned the channels, the shit didn’t work. I got the fuck out.”

Jordan Peele has confirmed in interviews that Murphy’s set, and an interaction with a girlfriend’s white parents who were suspiciously nice to him, inspired him to make Get (the fuck) Out.

2 Sarah Silverman Served Her Vagina From Her Deathbed

After a near-death experience, Silverman came to a life-changing realization: “Once your conscious mind is out of the way, it’s really sheer comic genius.” How she achieved comedic nirvana is an epic and appropriately filthy tale.

She had been battling a sore throat while out on the road, and after returning home, finally decided to get it looked at by a doctor. After one glance, her doctor diagnosed her with an abscess in her windpipe, and scheduled her for immediate surgery. (I promise this story gets funny soon.)

As she sat in a hospital bed getting pumped full of drugs, medical staff were warning her friends that this was a risky procedure that she may not wake up from. Silverman, meanwhile, tried to explain to the doctor that she wasn’t quite high enough, because she could still explain Brexit.

As you may have guessed, she lived to tell the tale. But she achieved a zen-like brainlessness as the drugs wore off. She had to have one hand bound to keep her from pulling out her breathing tube, but was allowed one free hand to scratch a “vagina-adjacent” itch: “And then my friend John was standing in the corner. I pulled my hand out, and then I, like, served it to John. And then another time, my hands were tied down, and I served it. And then he was like…”

She then mimics a big ol’ sniff, before describing a touching note she gave to one of her nurses: “Even though I had no mouth or hands, I made it clear to her, like it was an emergency. I had to tell her something. They had given me paper and a pencil. I'm writing, and it's, like, so important. I finally finish, and then I show it to her, and it just says, ‘Do you live with your mother?’ With a picture of a dick.”

Anyway, that’s “sheer comic genius,” according to Sarah Silverman.

1 Richard Pryor’s Heart Attack

Dana Gould once said that if any piece of stand-up comedy could be considered art, it was Pryor’s “Heart Attack” routine. In the original recording from 1979’s Live in Concert, Pryor grabs his chest and explains that he “had a little pain” in a way that makes the audience wonder if they’re actually witnessing a cardiac event. He then exploits this vulnerability by voicing his furious heart as a violent bully, unleashing a string of obscenities and literally kicking his own ass around the stage:

“Don’t breathe!”

“Huh?”

“You heard me motherfucker, I said don’t BREATHE!”

“Okay I won’t breathe. I won’t breathe. I won’t breathe. I won’t—”

“Then shut the FUCK up then!”

“Okay I swear, don’t kill me. Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me—”

“Get on one knee and PROVE it!”

“I’m on one knee, don’t kill me!”

“You’re thinkin’ about dying now ain’t ya?”

“Yeah I’m thinkin’ about that.”

“You didn’t think about that when you was eatin’ all that PORK!”

Pryor then elbow drops himself to the floor of the stage and writhes in pain as the beating continues. He plays out the rest of the scene from the floor, pleading to God, apologizing to his heart for speaking to God without permission, and finally waking up in an ambulance full of white people staring at him, thinking he’d gone to “the wrong motherfucking heaven.”