Mr. Creosote is a fictional character who appears in Monty Python'sThe Meaning of Life. He is a monstrously obese, rude restaurant patron who is served a vast amount of food and alcohol whilst vomiting repeatedly. After being persuaded to eat an after-dinner mint – "It's only wafer-thin" – he explodes in a very graphic way. The sequence opens the film's segment titled "Part VI: The Autumn Years". The character is played by Terry Jones, who directed the film. According to Jones, John Cleese, who played the Maître d'hôtel, struggled to keep a straight face saying "wafer-thin mint" and also struggled to get out of shot without bursting into laughter.
Synopsis
In the sequence, Mr. Creosote dines at a French restaurant. The entrance of this morbidly obese middle-aged man is accompanied by ominous music. One of the fish in the aquarium exclaims "Oh shit—it's Mr. Creosote!" as he passes, causing all the fish to swim for cover. The scene opens with a short dialogue between Mr. Creosote and the maître d', played by John Cleese:
Maître d': "Ah, good afternoon, sir; and how are we today?"
Mr. Creosote: "Better."
Maître d': "Better?"
Mr. Creosote: "Better get a bucket, I'm gonna throw up."
Creosote is then led to his table, and once seated starts projectile-vomiting, generally failing to hit the provided bucket. The floor quickly becomes covered in, and so do the cleaning woman and the maître d's trousers. Creosote listens patiently while the menu's highlights are read out to him by the maître d', and after vomiting on the menu held open in front of him, he orders :
He finishes the feast, and several other courses, vomiting profusely all over himself, his table, and the restaurant's staff throughout his meal, causing other diners to lose their appetite, and in some cases, throw up as well. The audience, however, never sees Creosote eating, with the sole exception of him seemingly chewing on a whole pineapple towards the end of the sequence. Finally, after being persuaded by the smooth maître d' to eat a single "wafer-thin mint", his stomach begins to rapidly expand until it explodes: covering the restaurant and diners with viscera and partially digested food—even starting a "vomit-wave" among the other diners, who leave in disgust. When the explosion clears, Creosote is amazingly still alive, but his chest cavity and abdomen are now blasted open, revealing his spread ribs and intact, still-beating heart, and viscera. As he looks around, seemingly confused by what has just happened, the maître d' calmly walks up to him and presents, "monsieur, the check".
Production
In the documentary The Meaning of Making 'The Meaning of Life, John Cleese said that the sequence, originally written by Jones and Michael Palin, was initially rejected. Cleese said the initial version suffered from a flawed construction and rewrote it with Graham Chapman. At the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival — Tribute to Monty Python it was claimed Cleese was taken with the unflappable maître d' character. Jones thought Creosote should be played by fellow Python Terry Gilliam, before Gilliam persuaded Jones to play the role instead. Jones was transformed into Mr. Creosote by British prosthetic make-up artist Christopher Tucker, who also created the prosthetic effects for the American film drama The Elephant Man. The was portrayed using large amounts of condensed minestrone soup. This made a considerable mess of the filming location, the Porchester centre in Bayswater, west London.
Reception
When asked about his proclivity toward gruesome film violence, director Quentin Tarantino said that the "Mr. Creosote" scene was the only time he had been disturbed by a graphic or gruesome film sequence. In his 2015 Movie Guide, Leonard Maltin described Mr. Creosote as having "an unforgettable scene, like it or not".
