Monty Python and Philosophy

by Gary L. Hardcastle

  The maitre d’ hands him a menu; he disgorges himself all over it. The servant has to wipe it off so that he can read it. Moreover, it should be added, this vomit looks pretty convincing. Even the most ardent Python fan is apt to feel a twinge of nausea coming on.

  Hearing the specials, all delicacies of a diversity befitting the original Gargantua, Creosote orders the lot, mixed into a bucket with eggs on top, along with a double portion of pâté, six bottles of wine, two magnums of champagne and perhaps some ale. Pope Gregory the Great defined gluttony as eating too soon, too delicately, too expensively, too greedily, and too much. Creosote’s nausea indicates he is not ready for his next meal; it is too soon. He eats expensive delicacies as if they were potato chips. And he eats too much; he eats the entire menu. It is no wonder that Michael Palin called this routine a “Gothic Extravaganza.”12 It is like an illustration of one of the Deadly Sins.

  Creosote, reminding one of an image out of James Ensor, the nineteenth-twentieth-century Belgian expressionist, continues to vomit as he eats. Other customers are disgusted and start leaving to the visible chagrin of the maitre d’; some are heaving themselves. The maitre d’ accidentally steps into Creosote’s pail of vomit and Creosote erupts upon his leg, to the evident great annoyance of the maitre d’. The maitre d’ is reaching the end of his tether. Finally, Creosote is finished, but the maitre d’ willfully tempts him, even prods him, to take one more bite, just a bit of a thin wafer of mint, despite the fact that Creosote protests that he is absolutely full.

  Almost immediately, that slice of mint does its vengeful work. Creosote literally explodes, issuing forth a tidal wave of vomit that splashes every comer of the dining room. In the center of this dripping mess, then, sits Creosote, his belly blown open so that one can see his rib cage; but his red, fist-like heart relentlessly continues pumping as it dangles under his chin. His eyes are open, his face still carrying that mask of impassive brutishness he has worn throughout the scene. The maitre d’, overjoyed and very self-satisfied by the success of his revenge plot, gives Creosote the check.

  To Laugh, or To Scream?

  This scene, involving non-stop nausea and a graphically exploded body, sounds more horrific than comic. It, like so much of the humor of Monty Python, is on the dark side. The scene has few peers in the annals of motion picture comedy, save perhaps the pie-eating sequence in Stand By Me. But even that seems tame next to the spectacle of Mr. Creosote’s extravasation. The philosophical question it raises is: how is it possible to laugh at humor as black as this? Though it may seem paradoxical that mirth could issue from depicting a situation so gruesome and disgusting, perhaps this will not strike us as so strange when we recall how much humor—such as bathroom humor—revels in the repulsive. And yet there is nevertheless something perplexing about this scene. How can the gag function as a source of comic amusement for so many, rather than leaving them trembling in horror? Why is the sequence comic rather than horrific? This seems paradoxical. Since negotiating paradoxes is one of the charges of philosophy, answering that question is the aim of this chapter. And in the process, we wish to learn what Mr. Creosote can teach us about laughter.

  Let us agree from the outset that many people laugh at this scene; they find it comically amusing. This is not to deny that some also find it disgusting, and even unwatchable. And even those who enjoy the routine may experience moments during it when their stomach feels on the verge of revolting. Nevertheless, there are a significant number of people who find the scene on balance risible, and even continuously so—that is, they laugh all the way through. Our question is, How can they do so? How can anyone find the explosion of a human body to be comically amusing? If anything, the prospect is horrifying.

  One way to make some headway with this problem is to think about what makes for horror, especially in mass culture.13 In popular fictions, including literature and motion pictures, horror is typically focused upon a particular sort of object, namely, a monster—that is, a creature whose existence is unacknowledged by science and who, in addition, is dangerous and disgusting. For example, the Frankenstein monster is a scientific impossibility—electrifying dead flesh will fry it, not animate it—and the monster is disgusting, an impure being constructed of rotting, dismembered body parts. And perhaps most obviously, the monster is dangerous: it kidnaps, maims, and kills people.

  Maybe we are tempted to think of the restaurant vomiting scene as horror rather than comedy because Creosote, it would appear, shares many of the attributes that characterize horror. For example, I expect that he is a physiological impossibility; even supposing that someone could reach his girth, it is unlikely that he would be able to move on his own power. Creosote is of a scale of obesity where the patient usually has to be moved by handlers. But Creosote is also beyond the ken of science, both in the manner of his explosion and, then, of his survival. People don’t burst like that, balloons do; and if they did, they would not live to tell the tale. But one suspects that Creosote will have himself sewn up again in order to eat another day.

  Moreover, Creosote, like Frankenstein’s monster, is certainly disgusting. In the first instance, his behavior is disgusting. His constant vomiting presents a challenge to the strongest stomach. I think that were it not the case that film is odorless—that, thankfully, smell-o-rama has not yet been perfected—many viewers would be unable to hold onto their own dinners throughout this episode. Indeed, Creosote’s name suggests a foul odor, inasmuch as it labels a colorless liquid, a pungent burning agent, that smells of smoked meat and tar. Creosote’s incontinence, furthermore, functions metonymically in the same way in which the rats, spiders, and other vermin that inhabit the vampire’s lair function—namely, as disgusting things designed to accentuate the abominableness of the thing to which they are attached or which they surround.

  But it is not only what is connected to Creosote that is disgusting. Creosote himself is loathsome, an abomination. Undoubtedly, he is the sort of thing we call monstrous in ordinary language. Like the Frankenstein monster or the creatures in the Alien and Predator series, Creosote is physically repulsive. The thought of being hugged by Creosote is probably enough to make most of us squirm; and imagine what visualizing a kiss on the lips from him might do to your digestion. Once again, like the Frank-enstein monster, the Alien, and the Predator, there is something viscerally revolting, unclean, and impure about Creosote.

  It’s the impurity of the monster in horror fictions that elicits the response of disgust from audiences. This impurity, in turn, is rooted in the ontology, or being, of horrific creatures. Such creatures are violations or problematizations of our standing cultural categories. For that reason they are abominations possessing a combination or collection of properties that our culture trains us to revile on contact. For instance, the Frankenstein monster violates the categorical distinction between life and death. It is both. It is a walking contradiction, as is Chucky, the puppet that kills, from the film Child’s Play. The Predator, a category violation if there ever was one, is part crab and part primate. The Blob defies our categories by not fitting into any of them; it is stuff out of control. The Amazing Colossal Man is horrifically repulsive because he is too colossal; he violates the criteria of what it is to be human in virtue of his scale. Creosote likewise is monstrous just because his figure seems to go beyond not only what is normal but even beyond what is humanly possible. He is a travesty of the human form; he is an affront to our norms of the human form. He strikes us as inhuman or nonhuman. But as a result of effectively claiming membership in that category—that is, in our species—he triggers an aversive response on our part.

  Who’s Afraid of Mr. Creosote?

  Creosote is a monster and he incurs our disgust. So far the horror formula is realized. But two points need to be made. First, disgust, including disgust elicited by the violation of our standing norms and categories, does not belong solely to the domain of the genre of horror. It is, as noted earlier, also a natural ingredient of comedy. This, of cou
rse, should be extremely evident. Think of how much humor, especially juvenile humor, hinges on celebrating disgusting things—farts, feces, and slime. Insofar as mention of these things, which are themselves categorically interstitial (ambiguously both part of me and outside of me), is also a violation of the norms of propriety, they are staples of humor. Disgust, that is, belongs as much to comedy as to horror. But in order for a categorical violation to turn into an occasion for horror, something else must be added, namely, fear. So the second point to be addressed is whether the fear-condition for the elicitation of horror has been met in the Creosote sequence. For if it has not been, then we can start to explain why the Creosote scene is comic rather than horrific.

  In horror fictions, the monster is fearsome and disgusting because it is dangerous and impure. Standardly, the monster in a horror fiction is not threatening to the audience. They know that they are encountering a fiction and that they can suffer no harm from the creatures that rule the page and the screen. Rather they feel fear for the humans in the fiction who are being stalked or otherwise imperiled by the monsters. Insofar as we feel concern for the plight of those fictional characters—that is, insofar as we anticipate that harm will befall them at the hands, talons, or other instruments of the monsters—the fear condition of the horror formula is activated.

  However, when we turn to the scene with Mr. Creosote, there is no fear factor. We do not fear for the other customers in the restaurant. They are in no great danger from Mr. Creosote. They are unquestionably offended by him. This may garner some sympathy for them (or, it may not, if you regard them as insufferable swells deserving of being taken down a peg). But it will not elicit fear in their behalf, since they are in no grievous danger, bodily or otherwise.

  But perhaps Creosote is the human who should elicit our concern. After all, he’s a person (ain’t he got some rights?), and he does explode. And he is harmed by the machinations of the maitre d’. However, here Creosote shows us something about how comedy works. Creosote is not quite human. Not only is he too outsized. But he is utterly impervious to his repeated bouts of nausea—what human can take fits of retching in his stride the way Creosote does?—and he, of course, survives the massive explosion of his belly. In this, Creosote not only resembles the monster of horror fictions. He also resembles that staple of slapstick comedy, the clown.

  The clown is not exactly human. With respect of our norms for the average human, the clown is either too fat or too tall, too thin or too short. His mouth is painted to appear exaggeratedly large and his eyes and head are often too small. He is a misproportioned human. Nor are his cognitive skills near the norm; generally he is too stupid. And his body can also take abuse that no actual person could. He can be hit on the head with a sledge hammer and suffer no more than a dizzy swoon where the rest of us would be hospitalized with a concussion. He takes falls with abandon and always pops up for another slam. It is as if his bones were made of rubber. Instead of breaking, they snap back into place.

  It’s because the clown is marked as so ontologically different from us—especially in terms of his imperviousness to bodily harm—that we have no fear for his life and limb. We can laugh at the way in which his body with its incongruities taunts our concept of the human, because the mayhem the clown engages is nonthreatening. We need not fear for the clown; nor, in the standard case, need we fear clowns. They are, for the most part, benign. Thus, though monstrous, clowns and the other denizens of slapstick incur no horror, since no genuine harm will result in or from their shenanigans.

  Mr. Creosote belongs to the same fantastic species as the clown. He is not precisely human, so we do not fear for him as we do for the characters in horror fictions. He is able to suffer through things that would incapacitate or destroy ordinary mortals, because he is marked as of a different ontological order. Because Creosote can neither harm nor can he be harmed, his monstrosity becomes an occasion for comic amusement rather than horror. This is one thing that Mr. Creosote shows us about laughter.

  It has been established experimentally that children will laugh when confronted with something incongruous—like a “funny face”—if the face is offered by someone with whom they are familiar, but they will cringe if it is presented by a stranger. This suggests that our responses to incongruities, anomalies, unexpected deviations from norms and standing categories will vary in terms of certain conditions. If the incongruity occurs in a context where it is threatening, it will dispose us toward a fearful response. This is perhaps the origin of the horror genre. On the other hand, if the context is one that is marked as non-threatening—where the prospect of harm and danger has been subtracted—the circumstances are ripe for comedy. The Mr. Creosote scene illustrates this principle dramatically by getting as perilously close to the conditions that satisfy the horrific, but remaining on the side of amusement. In this it exemplifies a principle that makes much cruel humor possible: we need not fear for the victims of all the violence and malevolence done in darker shades of comedy, including slapstick, because they are not completely human. Punch and Judy can be beaten mercilessly but they will never come within an inch of their lives. Mr. Creosote never suffers or dies. He is not precisely our kind of creature. Thus, we may laugh at him.

  Just Desserts

  But this is not all that Mr. Creosote tells us about laughter. It’s true that in order to find a routine like his comically amusing we must not fear for him. And we do not, since he is not subject to human vulnerability. Instead we focus on his monstrous incongruity, his absurdity. But it’s not just that we do not feel concern about Creosote because we know he cannot be harmed. We also are encouraged to form a positive animus against Creosote. We do not just laugh at the ontological incongruity of Creosote and what befalls him. Part of our laughter, even if it is not pure comic laughter, originates in our sense that Creosote gets what he deserves. Part of our laughter is vindictive or, at least, retributive. What has happened to Creosote, or so we are invited to suppose, is just. Though Creosote is not completely human, he is human enough to engender our scorn morally and to merit punishment. Moreover, we cannot help but think that his punishment fits his crime ever so appropriately. Think of how often we describe the aftermath of our own gluttonous escapades in terms of a feeling that we are about to explode. Creosote gets his just desserts, one might say. On the one hand, Creosote is a despicable character. He treats others with contempt, presumably because he thinks his evident wealth entitles him to do so. He spits up on servants with no sense of shame; they are beneath his selfish concern. He has no inkling of decorum and is insensitive to the existence of other people and their rightful claims. He is an egoist of stupendous proportions. And, of course, he has abused himself immensely. His vast bulk appears to be his own fault. It is the height of self-indulgence to eat so far past the point of satiation that one continues to press on while one is still egesting the surplus of one’s last meal. Creosote has sown what he reaps. He has asked for what he has gotten. His own greedy appetite has backfired, so to speak. His explosion is poetic justice. The maitre d’s retribution was warranted. To repeat, Creosote’s predicament almost literally amounts to nothing more or less than his just desserts. The pun is intended by me, as it was also probably intended by the Pythons.

  We laugh, but it is not precisely the laughter of comic amusement. It is the laughter that accompanies the apprehension that someone has “gotten what’s coming to them.” Thus, there should be no surprise that people laugh at the scene instead of being horrified by it. We are not repelled by the violence Creosote undergoes, in part because we believe that he has brought it upon himself; he invited it. Ours is the laughter of justice—the laughter that obtains when we perceive that the punishment suits the crime ever so neatly.

  As already suggested, there is something medieval about the Creosote episode; indeed, a medieval theme runs throughout the film, including dungeons and the Grim Reaper (perhaps this is a result of taking up, and then dismissing, Roman Catholicism as a source of the
meaning of life). In many ways, the scene is the modern equivalent of a morality play, an allegory of gluttony and its consequences. If you eat to the point where you feel like exploding, you will. The scene culminates in a visual pun or verbal image—that is, it literalizes the way we describe ourselves when we’ve overindulged at the table gluttonously. Creosote’s sentence is the sentence “I’ve eaten so much that I’d burst if took another morsel.” He does and he does. It is a punishment befitting Dante’s Inferno or Kafka’s “The Penal Colony” in its diabolical ingenuity and appropriateness. Indeed, it provokes laughter for being so appropriate, so well-deserved.

  The laughter engendered by Creosote’s predicament is, then, over-determined. Part of it is rooted in incongruity—the absurdities of the scene presented in a context bereft of any perceived danger to human life and limb. But there is also another route to laughter here: the sense that justice is served, that the punishment matches the crime perfectly. Moreover, with respect to this second source of joy, Mr. Creosote, I think, gives us additional insight into the springs of laughter. Much comedy, especially satire and even much of what is called black comedy, induces laughter because we feel that the objects of the indignities and violence suffered by its objects is deserved.14 It is a different kind of laughter than the laughter prompted by an innocent pun. And it is our sense of justice that makes such comic genres possible. This too is something that Mr. Creosote shows us about laughter.

  Perhaps one thing that is so artistically effective about the Creosote episode is that it is able to weld these two sources of laughter so exquisitely. I suspect that it achieves this by the way in which the visual pun it articulates both comically amuses us with its absurdity—its violation of biological norms—while simultaneously satisfying our sense of justice in the most devilish manner. Like many medieval visions of hell, such as the punishments meted out in Dante’s Inferno, the travails of Creosote mix horror and humor in a way that seems natural. Whether the scene has the same pedagogical intent is doubtful. But it is not a parody of such extravaganzas. Rather it taps into the same emotional well by being an updated version of them. Horrific imagery and humor are often interlaced. Mr. Creosote shows us how these two ostensibly opposed elements can co-exist. They belong together because they both specialize in the incongruous and the impure—in violations of our standing cultural categories and norms. But the overall effect of these subversions of our cultural categories will not dispose us toward horror, unless they occur in the context of some clear and present danger. Where there is no danger to anything we would call human, there is no cause for horror, and there is an opening for laughter. That is Creosote. Moreover, Creosote is not just comically amusing for being a biological absurdity. He is also worthy of our derision for his sins (in his case, perhaps he is the sin itself personified). And this helps us to see that underlying the vitriol of humor is often a perception of justice.