This evening I watched a DVD called Dirty Jokes – a standup comedy DVD by American comedian Gilbert Gottfried.  This was another of my Amazon Vine freebies.  I am finally getting through them all now.

Any regular visitors here will know that I do enjoy comedy, but I didn’t really enjoy this one much.  For a start Gottfried has a style of delivery that on the irritation scale is up there with Pasquale.  It can get to be a bit wearing.  This is one of those DVDs where you keep glancing at the timer on the player, hoping it will not go on too much longer.The defining aspect of the whole performance is that nearly all the jokes have either a sexual or scatological subject or contain lots of bad language, and most of them tick both boxes.  The regular visitors alluded to above will know that I am not offended by bad language.  Far from it.   I just like it to be strategically and sparingly deployed for maximum impact and amusement.

It is like jewels (bear with me here).  A single precious stone that is well set in a good ring can be beautiful, impressive and classy.  Wearing a whole suit of diamonds as you sit in a car encrusted with rubies might be expensive, but will never fail to be tacky.  In the same way, a prolonged and inventive story with a a well-timed expletive dropped towards the end has more punch than a string of swearing.  Used well it is big and it is clever, here it is merely dull and it devalues the currency.

But, of course, there are exceptions, and it all depends on context. The Thick of it (which I have never seen – really) apparently makes a feature of the cumulative effect of swearing, and Gerry Sadowitz , who I saw earlier in the year, has made swearing an art form as part of his stage persona – and I really do hope it is just a stage persona.

By coincidence, after watching this I saw Richard Herring on Newsnight, discussing offensiveness in comedy with Paxo and I think he may have made a similar point, but with more hair.

This is what I actually wrote about Dirty Jokes:

Gottfried has a ‘marmite’ style of delivery: you either love it or hate it. With a permanent squint screwing his eyes closed and often keeping his hand over them anyway while barks out jokes it can be difficult to see beyond that to the material.  I don’t like marmite by the way, and find Gottfried’s delivery annoying, having seen him in short spots on the TV before.

The good news is that, after a while you get used to it.  It doesn’t get any better but at least it doesn’t get any worse over the approximately 50 minutes of the main feature.  So having got that out of the way I could concentrate on the content.

This is essentially just a string of jokes of the man-goes-to-the-doctor or salesman-calls-at-farmhouse type, nearly all stuffed full of ripe language, reaching its climax in a ten-minute version of the notorious ‘Aristocrats’ joke.

It didn’t really do it for me for two reasons.  Firstly the over-use of bad language reduced its power. A well-timed swear word in a routine can be a beautiful thing, but when the whole act is full of them that power is diffused. It goes without saying that if you are at all easily offended then this will be offensive to you (so why would you even watch a DVD called Dirty Jokes?), but if you are not then it could well get to be tedious.

Even worse than that, half the jokes were familiar to me, some of them I can remember hearing at school in the 70s, and even then they were old.  I will freely admit that my personal preferences are for the more anecdotal comedians, but I can appreciate joke-tellers.  I just find it hard to appreciate them half as much if I have heard all the jokes.

There are some glimpses of a more versatile performer in the show – the impersonations of other comics are quite good, and there are some small diversions that add something to a couple of the jokes, but such moments are far too rare.

All that goes out of the window for the finale though. The Aristocrats joke more or less depends on you knowing it already, and it also depends on being as crude, offensive and disgusting as possible.

On a more positive note: the extras are good. For me they are better than the actual show.  There are ten or eleven extras.  I watched the first two, where Gottfried is just talking to the camera and being more anecdotal, rambling and inventive. Even the voice and mannerisms are scaled down to a less irritating level.  I expect I will watch the remaining extras quite soon, and may even return to them one day.  I do not expect I will watch the main feature again though.

So if you are in the market for some laddish, unsubtle, un-PC and sweary jokes that you can easily repeat down the pub get this.  Otherwise, try one of the many other comedy DVDs out there.  Just remember that when you do tell these jokes down the pub, most people will probably have heard them already.

Another positive thing to note.  I can’t recall any racism in the routine, except the standard Jewish stuff that Jewish comedians tend to do.  On the other hand there is some very suspect discussion of homosexuality in there.

To give some idea of the nature of the performance, this joke from the start of it is one of the least offensive, and one of the few that made me laugh.  If this doesn’t do it for you then – seriously – don’t touch this DVD with a bargepole because unfortunately it doesn’t get any better than this.

I tattooed “I love you” on my penis.  When I got home and showed my wife she said “don’t try to put words into my mouth!”

Most amazing of all, on Amazon when I look at the product page for this it says that most buyers also bought the Black Books box set and offers a deal on buying them together.  I really can’t see a lot of common ground between them.  It is like buying Titanic and Planet Terror together.  They also reckon there are only 3 copies left in stock, so somebody must be buying this stuff.

I’m sure Stewart Lee will be a lot better on Friday!