CONTENT WARNING for a Lot of vomit.
There is no introduction to this clip better than the one provided by the talking fish at its start: “Oh, shit! It’s Mr Creosote!” In this infamous sketch from Monty Python’s final film, The Meaning of Life, the aforementioned Mr Creosote enters an upscale French restaurant and asks for a bucket. This is duly brought for him, and so begins a five-minute odyssey of vomit and overindulgence which just so happens to embody Bakhtin’s definition of grotesque realism.
The sketch parodies ritual in the same way that carnival does, creating a parodic fine dining experience which is quickly ruined by its central clown character. In this sketch, like the grotesque realism outlined by Bakhtin, “all that is bodily becomes grandiose, exaggerated, immeasurable” as Mr Creosote orders “the lot” and eats it from a bucket, vomiting as he goes, creating a slipping hazard for passing waiters, and finally exploding. In the carnivalesque tradition, degradation and grotesque realism is not limited to one character—Creosote’s waiter steps in the bucket and ends up covered in vomit after attempting to point out an item on the menu, while a woman attempting to flee the restaurant claims to be leaving because she is on her period and fears “bleeding all over the seat” on her train home. Thus the grotesque is invoked in a variety of characters and situations, leading to a carnivalesque chaos of bodily fluids and degradation.
The grotesque, as Bakhtin points out, is related to both cyclical time and ambivalence, two elements which this sketch also embraces. Mr Creosote is a regular at the restaurant—the waiters know him and anticipate his needs, a version of the carnival as a cyclical celebration linked to seasonal changes and holidays. It is also an inverted, grotesque version of a feast, mirroring carnival’s origins in the celebration of feasts. The waiters also remain completely impassive to Mr Creosote’s outpourings (sorry), maintaining the sense of professionalism and ritual required for the restaurant. For a time, bodily functions and grotesque realism supersede class differences and artifice, replacing it with the unbounded chaos and celebration of the degrading and the base. And while I agree with Eco that this may not be the great equalizing force that some proclaim carnival and grotesque realism to be, sometimes it is just entertaining to watch Terry Jones puke on John Cleese for five minutes. He had it coming.