Carl Remick wrote:
>
> I will simply say that I find it disturbing so many
> people find this joke -- a virtual H-bomb of misanthropy -- so amusing.
It occurs to me that the joke's genre is what used in the '40s & '50s to be referred to as a shaggy dog joke. The principle of that genre was to have a long (VERY long) wind-up followed by a punchline that was totally anti-climactic and flat. Such jokes when told in company by a good enough speaker were, very occasionally, quite humorous. If The Aristocrats is rougly 3 generations old, it may well have been born among stand-up comics as a private version to end all versions of the shaggy dog joke.
A general (and banal but still important) principle of construal is that an utterance can only be understood if one grasps its genre correctly. Genre is the unit of communication
Carrol