The Parable of Mr. Creosote

Hannah Berger

I remember my dad puffing himself up, keeping air in his cheeks, clutching his stomach in theatrical ache, then becoming the server, pushing the after-dinner mint, then characterizing the mint itself, shrinking into a diminutive crouch, bringing his hands near his chin and pinching his fingers together, becoming deceptively wee, meek, and mild, and then puffing up to inhabit the character of Mr. Creosote again just in time for his final bite, the mint, and his subsequent explosion. The sequence, a summary of Part VI: “The Autumn Years” of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, was one of my dad’s favorites to recount.  

I’ll clarify the sketch: Mr. Creosote enters an upscale French restaurant to the horror of the restaurant and everyone in it. He immediately begins to vomit, soiling the restaurant and everyone in it, then orders everything on the menu, which is served to him altogether in a vat. He eats and vomits in tandem until he is, finally, too full to continue eating. At this point, his server enacts revenge by offering him just one additional morsel, a mint. Mr. Creosote caves, eats the mint, and then explodes. Alive and conscious, he receives his check. As he sits with his middle blown open, his beating heart exposed, we can rest assured that he’s already paid his price. Oh, and he’s impossibly fat and very rude.  

“Creosote is of the scale of obesity where the patient has to be moved by handlers,” writes Noël Carroll in his philosophical rationalization of laughter in response to the horrific plot  of the sketch. In “What Mr. Creosote Knows About Laughter,” Carroll justifies the comedy that we find in Mr. Creosote’s condition on the basis of his inhumanity and nonhuman-ness, the latter claim he bases on Mr. Creosote’s ability to act freely despite his size and apparent nausea. Because Mr. Creosote is not completely debilitated by his condition, and conducts his life despite it, (supposedly) as he wishes, he could not possibly be human. And with his humanity pushed aside, we find his visible self-abuse to be a hoot. That’s one hinge, here’s the other: Mr. Creosote’s humanity isn’t pushed aside so far as to become unusable, for, at the time of his explosion, and the ability to pop is arguably the least-humanly-possible of his attributes, it is decided that “he is human enough to engender our scorn morally and to merit punishment.” The very punishment, in its parabolic symmetry with the crime, seems inevitable (he got what was coming to him) despite the server’s forceful hand in surpassing this body’s brink, and accordingly just. 

What Carroll identifies is true in the sense that it reveals the streaks of cruelty and self justification that form the basis of our monstrosity, not Mr. Creosote’s. That, and the scaffolding that the creators of the sketch built around our contempt, the platforms from which we self justify. The sketch reads as propaganda—it presents us with someone whose body falls outside of societal standards of allowance, it exaggerates his form, shows you that his condition is his fault and your burden, concerning which he has absolutely no regard, and finally it says, this is what should befall him, our Hammurabi-style punishment, which also happens to be, by the way, all his fault. The sketch puppeteers our existing condemnation, so that we feel it is out of our hands. From this place of faultlessness, the condemnation sown within us—what we’ve learned from subtleties and attacks, from parents and strangers, in private and in public—has license to arise, and from it, laughter.  

Subtlety has no place in the grotesqueries of the sketch, but if there had been a chance of missing the point of Mr. Creosote’s role from his performance alone, the sketch opens with his foil—an example of “how one should be.” When Mr. Creosote enters he interrupts the restaurant’s enjoyment of a musical performance. The performer, white, male, of acceptable build, fits the description of the most highly regarded type amongst the Monty Python-verse and, just in case we didn’t realize this, the performer sings a well-received song that celebrates the principle condition of his privilege: his dick. Isn’t it nice to have one, the song poses? I bet. The patrons of the restaurant applaud this exemplification of permissibility until they are subjected to the opposite in Mr. Creosote, whose impermissible size and illness preclude the rewards of his birthright, so that even the tanked fish wriggle away at the sight of Mr. Creosote when he enters. 

Because I am quiet and do not find everything to be funny, I have been designated, mostly by men and by others who value the qualities associated with being one, as uptight, reserved, not an easy laugh, and even, as one put it, psychically “starved.” I’m compelled to defend myself here by saying that if you tell me a joke that involves any solid, liquid, or gas escaping the knit of an asshole (if it is not rooted in misogyny or otherwise cruel), I’ll laugh. But here I see horror. I see self-abuse and sickness and flippancy. I see bulimia sped up.  

In parables (more than a comedy sketch or propaganda, this section of The Meaning of Life is a parable), violence befalling someone is shorthand for “lesson learned.” The point of the telling is for the listeners learn the lesson, too. But reduced to shorthand, the lesson, unless one knows it already, isn’t always discernable. A few days ago I watched an episode of The Office in which Will Ferrell’s character, as the office boss, ignores and belittles the women who work for him. I don’t need fiction to show me this, and I was ready to skip the episode, but then Alec said, “Are you sure you don’t want to finish it? In the end he gets what’s coming to him.” After being challenged to a basketball game, Ferrell’s character is too clingy with the dunk, and the hoop and stand tip over, putting him into a coma of indeterminable length. He was certainly punished for something. But what was the lesson of the parable, if one doesn’t already know it? The lesson seems to be that one should always check if the hoop is bolted to the ground before dunking like that.  

Because the violence that befalls him bears a mirror-resemblance to what he’s done, Mr. Creosote appears to get “what’s coming to him” in the strictest sense, and it would seem to follow that the lesson is easily discernable. Mr. Creosote eats irresponsibly, and he explodes. The complicating aftermath is that, in the same way he binges through his sickness, he endures, and, implied in the casualness with which the violence is received, will persist. Mr. Creosote appears to be immune to real and final consequence. Unless the consequence is implicit and universal: the sketch itself. Mr. Creosote’s very existence is his own punishment, and along with it, an enduring hatred from the characters with which he shares the scene and the viewers each time it’s viewed. But wouldn’t that make the writers of the sketch—the ones who took the bare bones of a fat man with an eating disorder and lathered him with depravity—responsible for the wrongdoing, if the creation is so vile that it embodies not only crime but also punishment? I don’t know. We don’t really care. We wanted to see him reach the brink and explode.