BRITISH comics Eric Idle, Eddie Izzard and Billy Connolly are among 100 famous comedians starring in a film so lewd that one of America’s biggest cinema chains is refusing to show it.

The poster for The Aristocrats proclaims proudly that the documentary is “obscene, disgusting, vulgar and vile”. An endless retelling of the world’s dirtiest joke, the movie goes on release in America this week without a ratings certificate and will be shown in Britain at the Edinburgh Festival next month.

Although the AMC cinema chain has announced it will not be screening the film, some critics have hailed it as a masterpiece of wit. The Hollywood Reporter said the comedy “classic” might be the “funniest movie you’ll ever see”.

Yet the contents of the joke, which can include incest, rape, child sexual abuse, sodomy, defecation and bestiality, are no laughing matter. As Idle, the former Monty Python star, says suggestively on screen: “There’s no act in England that an aristocrat won’t do.”

The gag dates back nearly a century to the early days of American vaudeville. Over the decades, it was passed on as a trade secret among comedians backstage.

Its place in the annals of show business tempted a host of leading comics, such as Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg, to take part in the film.

The joke always begins in the same way. A man seeks work from a theatrical agent, who asks: “What’s your act?” The man replies that it is a “family act” and goes on to describe the most outlandish and perverted group sex imaginable. The challenge to every comedian who retells the gag is to top that.

The punchline never varies either. The stunned agent asks: “What’s the act called?” and the response is: “The Aristocrats!” Cue laughter, disgust or incomprehension.

The film’s director, Paul Provenza, a stand-up comic, said: “It’s a private game for comedians who do not want to worry about what people think about them. They want to show their peers how good they are at being bad.”

At the film’s Los Angeles premiere last week, Izzard, whose sell-out stage shows are known for their affable whimsy, seemed uncomfortable with its content. “It’s not really my type of humour and I don’t think that the punchline really works at all, but it is a tribute to the blue humour that you do not see very often at the cinema,” he said. “It’s not the language. I swear on stage all the time — it’s just not to my taste.”

Connolly was first told the joke backstage in Glasgow in the 1970s and felt he had been initiated into the comics’ fraternity. “I realised that was the moment when I had made it. It was hilarious to hear all these old guys trying to outdo each other in wild ways.”

Others are less impressed. Ted Baehr, of the Christian film magazine Movieguide, said The Aristocrats was “a foul movie”.

“They think they are pushing the envelope but they don’t understand that most of America is turned off by their antics.”

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