It's only waffer thin!

Wikipedia has quite a good article about Mr Creosote. You could start with that, and of course the youtube clip, and the text. Neither of these seem to explain why our eponymous hero bears the name he does, and i for one would like to know. I don't know whom to ask: Pythons are falling off their perches like Beatles. Soon nobody who can remember the 70s will be left. (If you can remember it, you weren't there.. or was that the 60's..? I can't remember)

I feel quite pleased with myself for having known immediately — when i first saw this sketch — that Mr Creosote would eat too much and explode. [I don't know how i knew it but i did. With Python i always had the feeling — which of course could have been entirely misplaced — that i always knew what they were trying to do, even tho' i couldn't have put it into words — and in any case much of the time it didn't work anyway.]

The thing that seems important to me, but which no-one else seems to have noticed, is that Mr Creosote is a tragedy. It is, i think, the shortest tragedy there is. A tragedy?! Yes, Mr Creosote is destroyed by his failings. It's inevitable, and you know from the outset that it is inevitable, and that's part of why it is a tragedy.

It has to be admitted that he is offered a way out:

MAITRE D: And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint.
MR. CREOSOTE: Nah.
MAITRE D: Oh, sir, it's only a tiny, little, thin one.
MR. CREOSOTE: No. Fuck off. I'm full.
MAITRE D: Oh, sir. Hmm?
MR. CREOSOTE: [groan]
MAITRE D: It's only wafer thin.
MR. CREOSOTE: Look. I couldn't eat another thing. I'm absolutely stuffed. Bugger off.
MAITRE D: Oh, sir, just — just one.
MR. CREOSOTE: [groaning] All right. Just one.

but that doesn't help. He considers it but refuses it; refuses it against his expressed better judgement, indeed. This is a tragedy and the dénouement is written in the stars. While we are about it, the Maitre d' clearly knows what is going to happen, since he swiftly makes himself scarce.

We should not be surprised by Python writing a Tragedy. Python is very interested in media, in formats: Game shows, chat shows, news items . . .

The fact that he destroyed by an explosion is down to Python being a surrealist operation. (Is there a connection here with Bunbury, whom Lady Bracknell thinks is destroyed by an explosion? (``Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage?'') Are there other surrealist tragedies?

Colleagues on whom i have tried out this analysis sometimes say that it isn't a tragedy beco's there is no moral dimension to it. I'm not sure that that's entirely true; presumably it depends to a certain extent on whether or not Creosote has free will. Perhaps he has no free will, since his only function is to be a personification of gluttony, but that sort of question is a problem in all tragedies anyway. If my colleagues are correct you could think of Creosote as a kind of independence-proof that Tragedy is not a moral concept.

While we are on the subject of tragedy, Fawlty Towers is of course a tragedy not a comedy. (Which is why it is so painful to watch). But that's for another time.
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