Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

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