“Ladies and children not admitted.” Readers of Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” will remember that was the final line, in the biggest type, on the handbill for a performance of “The King’s Camelopard or The Royal Nonesuch” in the town of Brickville, Ark. The man calling himself the Duke of Bridgewater, who printed it up, had said: “There. If that line don’t fetch them, I don’t know Arkansas.”

And it did fetch them, as it always has done. Even in the permissive world of today, where “ladies” have been admitted into the full fellowship of what are still sometimes called “dirty” books, movies, and theatrical exhibitions, the ratings systems for movies and television designed to protect children give them, too, the thrill of – well, if not the forbidden, at least the discouraged.

The latest to try the trick is “The Aristocrats,” opening today in New York. Directed by Paul Provenza and produced by Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller, the movie consists of little apart from successive iterations of the same dirty joke by a Who’s Who of English-language comedic talent. The hook is a contemporary equivalent of the Duke’s “Ladies and children not admitted.” The film is being released without a rating, but every bit of publicity about it – including the article you are reading – tells us the joke’s setup and punch line and no more.

One theatrical agent tells another that he’s got a new act and proceeds to describe it. When he has done so, the other asks him what the act is called.

“The Aristocrats,” he answers.

What makes the joke funny must be reserved for the darkness of the theater, though in public we can say that it is an endlessly inventive description of the series of sexual perversions of which the act consists. These are literally unspeakable in a “family” publication like this one, but as in Mark Twain’s Brickville, you can pay your money at the door for the privilege of descending into the licensed pit of sin and wickedness.

In our day, however, it is hard to ignore the artificiality of these boundaries. Last week, Michael Winterbottom’s “9 Songs” was sold on the basis of a similarly dubious distinction. It was said to be the first film not made as pornography to show certain sexual acts. Yet the publicists were unusually reticent about the question of what remained to distinguish the film from pornography if it showed those acts.

For both films, the publicity has been designed to strike a spark of danger and excitement from the now-cold ashes of the conflagration that, in the 1950s and 1960s, destroyed so many of our cultural taboos and nearly all of those relating to sex. It’s not an easy thing to do.

The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) in his study “Rabelais and His World” distinguished between what he called the Official and Unofficial Cultures of the Medieval and early modern periods. The Official Culture was that of morality, discipline, sacrifice, and earnestness; the Unofficial that of immorality, self-indulgence, cowardice, and laughter. The first produced epic, tragedy, and the higher forms of romance. The second produced the low comedy of the farce and the fabliau.

In Freudian terms, the Official Culture was the superego, the Unofficial the id. The relation between the two, said Bakhtin, was “dialogic.” That means that – also like the superego and the id – to some extent they depended on each other. Certainly, neither made very much sense in artistic terms without the other.

Rules, as they say, were made to be broken, and so were taboos. Yet the converse of that truism is that the pleasure of breaking taboos is directly proportional to the strength of the taboo in the first place. Without a strong and culturally potent moralism, immoralism becomes merely insipid.

That’s what we saw in the 1960s and 1970s, with the collapse of the Official Culture. Without the Official Culture’s efforts to suppress it, the Unofficial Culture became a bit of a bore. In recent years we have seen a Kennedy Center honor bestowed on Bob Dylan and a knighthood on Mick Jagger. Our political leaders think it humanizes them to associate with popular entertainers, some of whom appear displaying their scatological inventiveness in “The Aristocrats.” Such leaders aspire not to be like the heroes of old but like celebrities, the down-market, Unofficial equivalent.

It is an unnatural state of affairs and one that is inherently unstable. Bakhtin could have predicted that the unitary culture, the culture of Sir Mick or Bill Clinton discussing his underwear on MTV, would always tend to redivide, though perhaps on different lines. And that is what has happened. A new Official Culture has spun off in the form of what has recently come to be called political correctness and the late 20th-century obsession with health and safety. The new taboos are being offensive to women, minorities, or anyone who can claim to be ill or disabled, violating childish innocence, and smoking.

Another movie that opened last week flirted with each of these hopeful obscenities much more shockingly – at least potentially so – than “The Aristocrats” revived the old ones. In “Bad News Bears,” Billy Bob Thornton’s character is a reprise of his role in “Bad Santa.” He smokes, he drinks, he exploits the Little Leaguers he coaches by using them – and seriously endangering their health and safety – in his exterminating business.

But in other ways, the movie is curiously ambivalent. On the one hand, Mr. Thornton’s character is disgustingly slack about giving the team any real coaching or even going through the motions of trying to win games. On the other, he comes to care as much about winning as his anti-type, played by Greg Kinnear, the classic father-coach who lives in the reflected glory of his athletically gifted son.

So which is Official and which Unofficial? The movie finally cops out, making Billy Bob see in Greg what he wishes no longer to be and revert to his former laissez-faire approach. So in spite of his shocking irresponsibility earlier on and violation of all sorts of taboos about the treatment of children – which I guess we are meant simply to forget – he ends up in the same camp as the new Official culture, which holds that the point of Little League is not to win but just to have fun.

It’s typical of Hollywood to want to have it both ways. Throughout its history, the movie business in America has gone through periods when it has liked to think of itself as daring and “transgressive,” but it has rarely ventured to get into real trouble with the official culture by venturing beyond the tried-and-true and conventional.

Even the allegedly shocking “9 Songs” or “The Aristocrats” confine themselves to dancing on the remains of taboos that were shattered long ago. The really shocking thing today would be a joke not about sexual perversions but one targeting racial or sexual or ethnic minorities. Not that such things don’t exist, but they have gone underground – to occupy the place, perhaps, once held by the ancient joke “The Aristocrats” before it went mainstream.