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March 13, 2005 FRANK RICH The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told T was two and half weeks after 9/11 that I heard the dirtiest joke I'd ever heard in my life. New York was still tossing and turning under its blanket of grief back then. Almost no one was going out at night to have fun, a word that had been banished from the country's vocabulary. But desperately sad people will do desperate things. That's my excuse for making my way with my wife to the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, where the Friars Club was roasting Hugh Hefner. Someone had decided that the show must go on. A crowd materialized out of nowhere to pack a vast ballroom in an otherwise shadowy and deserted Midtown. On the dais were not only the expected clowns old (Alan King) and young (Jimmy Kimmel) but a surreal grab bag of celebrities out of Madame Tussauds: Dr. Joyce Brothers, Ice-T, Patty Hearst, Donald Trump. "God Bless America" was sung by Deborah Harry. The ensuing avalanche of Viagra jokes did not pull off the miracle of making everyone in the room forget the recent events. Restlessness had long since set in when the last comic on the bill, Gilbert Gottfried, took the stage. Mr. Gottfried, decked out in preposterously ill-fitting formal wear, has a manic voice so shrill he makes Jerry Lewis sound like Morgan Freeman. He grabbed the podium for dear life and started rocking back and forth like a hyperactive teenager trapped onstage in a school assembly. Soon he delivered what may have been the first public 9/11 gag: He couldn't get a direct flight to California, he said, because "they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first." There were boos, but Mr. Gottfried moved right along to his act's crowning joke. "A talent agent is sitting in is office," he began. "A family walks in - a man, woman, two kids, and their little dog. And the talent agent goes, "What kind of an act do you do?’ " What followed was a marathon description of a vaudeville routine featuring incest, bestiality and almost every conceivable bodily function. The agent asks the couple the name of their unusual act, and their answer is the punch line: "The Aristocrats." As the mass exodus began, some people were laughing, others were appalled, and perhaps a majority of us were in the middle. We knew we had seen something remarkable, not because the joke was so funny but because it had served as shock therapy, harmless shock therapy for an adult audience, that at least temporarily relieved us of our burdens and jolted us back into the land of the living again. Some weeks later Comedy Central would HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023097