Contributors:

The Big Steamy Thing

Jonathan Chaffer

Dwayne

The title of the song comes from a game invented by artists and thinkers in the Surrealist period. The game was called "Exquisite Corpse," and had two forms. The first was a drawing, in which the first participant would draw the topmost part of a picture and then fold over the paper so that only a few lines showed. The next player would use those lines to continue the picture, similarly folding over the paper when he was done. The resulting picture would be quite humorous. The other version (the one of which the Johns were aware) was similar, but involved writing a sentence or two of a story and only allowing the next player to see the end of it in order to continue the story.

That takes care of the motivation of the song, but not the meaning. Several ideas for who the Exquisite Dead Guy might be have been offered. Some possibilities include an Egyptian mummy, Lenin, and even Trent Reznor. The lyrics of the song really don't support any theory more than the others; most likely, They picked most of the phrases because they sounded good, not because they had special significance. What is pretty definite is that the point of view of the singer is that the dead guy is admirable in some way.