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  Skip DeLirio’s Worst Ever Gig

  C C Taylor

  Austin Macauley Publishers

  Skip DeLirio’s Worst Ever Gig

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Copyright Information

  Chapter OneEagles

  Chapter TwoElephants

  Chapter ThreeOwls

  Chapter FourSharks

  About the Author

  C C Taylor was born in the north of England, quite some time ago, gradually gravitating south via Reading and Oxford until arriving in Zaragoza, Spain, where he now resides. He has done more than 2,500 gigs as a stand-up, including four national TV appearances, and continues to do improvised comedy in Zaragoza. This is his first book in English, having already published Breve Historia del Humor Inglés in Spanish.

  About the Book

  Caesar’s army has returned from the long campaign in Gaul and the enemy has been all but defeated. Some of Pompey’s army, however, remains in Africa. Together with straggling Roman rebels and the local king Juba, they are gathering forces to prepare one last attack on what is now Caesar’s Rome. But there is one problem – a descendant of Scipio Africanus is fighting on the side of the Africans. And without a Scipio of their own, the superstitious Romans refuse to go to Africa to fight.

  So Caesar sends out soldiers to find himself a Scipio. Luckily, there is a man of such name right there in Rome – a local drunkard and tavern entertainer distantly descended from the legendary warrior. Kidnapped solely on account of his ‘heritage’, the lowly clown is forced to lead out the troops in the battle of Thapsus. There, ‘history’ tells us, Scipio ‘disappears from the historical record’.

  Until now.

  This is the story of how ‘Nobody’ Skip DeLirio, with the cards finally all dealt in his favour, still managed to fuck it up.

  History will only take you so far. The rest is make-believe.

  Dedication

  To Doris and JH Taylor

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © C C Taylor (2019)

  The right of C C Taylor to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication, may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788487917 (Paperback)

  ISBN 9781788487924 (Hardback)

  ISBN 9781528954815 (ePub e-book)

  www.austinmacauley.com

  First Published (2019)

  Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

  25 Canada Square

  Canary Wharf

  London

  E14 5LQ

  Chapter One

  Eagles

  Now here’s one you might like…

  That was what Skip used to say when a joke had sunk and he was trying to get the audience’s interest up again…he was funny, I’ll say that, and he could do all the characters – the strict old man, the bragging soldier, the parasitus, the coward and even the smothering materna and the slutty meretrix – but that was before he got slung out of the group. He liked to cross swords verbally, did Skip…and he liked wine more than is good for you – that’s something that runs in your family, or maybe you won’t go down that road. Of course, all you young ’uns say that you won’t when we ask you, I’m sure, I said I’d never touch the stuff when I was your age. Look what it did to my father!

  But Old Scipio…where to begin? Nowadays, there simply aren’t any comedians like your great uncle. Those were other times. He used to make a living by going ’round the taverns and brothels and birthday parties and he’d stand up – even if he wasn’t invited sometimes – and do his act.

  Now his act, well…some of it was funny stories, some of it was true stories, there was a lot of mime and face pulling…and tambourines and tumbling – which, as you can imagine, requires a fair bit of running around. Oh, and flute-playing – he never went anywhere without his plagiaulos. Well, until he got thrown out of the company of actors, him and one of his equally drunk actor chums, so then they hooked up as partners for a while, and that didn’t work out either – Skip figured he’d make more money if he did it alone. So that’s what he did in the end. When I say ‘the end’, I mean the last seventeen years! And it’s the last sixteen of those years I’m going to tell you about, since you asked…and remember…your mother and father – if he ever comes back – are not to know I’ve told you any of this. Vale?

  Well, this story begins in one of our great capital’s lower type of taverns…it’s er…it’s where the fish stalls are now, you won’t remember it…anyway this was a place where Skip was already well-known from his old theatre days and kind of allowed to hang around, especially when there was a big crowd in, and this was just after the Gallic wars, so the soldiers were all back, and the Social War had finally been settled in favour of Caesar, so all the Big Man’s troops were happy and had some money to spend. And as your great-granduncle quickly learned all the latest marching tunes, he was skilled in knowing where and when to play them for maximum sestertii and denarii, while the quadrans and the quincunx went straight back to the wine server to be converted directly into liquid.

  Your great-granduncle was twenty eight at this time and there he is playing this particular night to a packed and extremely rowdy house – which was a normal night, truth to tell, but magnified. Those were the gigs you could charm the most by ‘debasing the coin of your own art’ (he used to say!) by ‘shouting over the heads of drunks’, but he was a favourite with some of the locals and gained the attention of the returnees when he quickly learned to imitate their superiors, according to the tales he’d heard – and he was good with voices and falling over and all that sort of thing. I should say that an actor’s profession is not well looked upon even to this day. And here we join him on the bottom rung of that particular ladder, though if you ask me, young ‘un, even on the so-called top rung, the works of Terence and Plautus are hardly high art… ’Terence’ they call him, for the love of Jupiter! From Publius Terentius Afer: ‘Terry’s Free African Slave’…by the gods! That’s not a name, it’s a receipt. A blackamoor and a slovenly writer. I mean, how many conversations can a chap accidentally overhear in one evening? The last time I went to see a Terence, half the audience fucked off to watch some tightrope-walkers in the streets, and I went with them. There are only so many comedic rapes a mob can take. And Plautus, not much better – I remember him when he was a nobody, when he used to have to fall on his arse to get a laugh. ‘Bob the flat-footed clown’, he was called when he was still a stage hand doing the intervals. And they compare that with Seneca? And our own Melissus? At least he puts jokes in to alleviate the tedium. He has joke books out, you know? You probably know some of them… Do you like jokes? You know the one about the man sitting beside the tomb of his wife and the stranger comes up and says, ‘Who is resting in peace?’ and the man says, ‘Me, now,’ (much laughter) Ha ha ha… I must compose myself. Don’t tell your mother that joke, either, eh?

  So where were we? Oh, yes, poor Scipio, booted out of the theatre company and then hitting every rung on the ladder of self-destruction like the successive animal bodies some believe us to inhabit, from angel to man, to eagle, to beast, to small, feathered night-bird to worm – falling ev
er downward until…well, let us be honest, at the point where we encounter Skip, having hit a certain level of notoriety and having let the good times get the better of him, now on the downward slope again he was rolling around in the dirt if it got a laugh, hitting himself in the face and all that.

  And your great-grand great whatsoever was a man who’d met with some success. But the winds of fashion change and Bacchus’ lure is great to some – though Bacchus gave way to Hermes, as we shall find out – so ‘Why in Hades would anyone choose to be a comedian?’ you’re thinking, young Marcus Egnatius. Especially, since old Scipio chose it over a decent profession that’s been in the family for generations…and well you might wonder why. A lawyer’s job is not a popular one but we never want for bread or shelter. As you’ll see, there were times when he had neither. Yet I know what he’d say…something about, ‘when you look back on your life, Marcus, will you be able to say you played to a crowd of three hundred? Will you be able to say you left them aching with laughter? Aye, there are hardships, but in the end…blah blah blah…’

  By way of some half arsed explanation, I may offer here two stories that your great uncle used to tell me about his comedian heroes. One good, one not so good.

  The first; Quintus Roscius Gallus…that’s right! Roscius! You’ve heard of him! That’s good. He must have been dead some fifty years now, but you still hear his name, then? Even amongst the ‘youth’ who have no time for anything but the present? Excellent. To have a mere actor so famous even after his death! A disgusting, uneducated…‘actor’…hobnobbing with the political elite, passing for High Society…I’ve never seen the like before or since, Marcus, I can tell you. The funeral! I can even remember the funeral! You would have thought an emperor had died.

  And what was even more remarkable about Quintus is that he had been born a slave, see? Only about three miles from this very spot. Scipio used to point out the house (though how he could possibly have known I cannot say. His imagination again, I suppose). As soon as Quintus was born, he was marked out for great things, they say. One day as a baby, when he was sleeping in his cot, he was found by his nursemaid with a snake coiled around him. When she approached the cot, the snake uncoiled itself from his Quintus’ body and slithered away without biting.

  What was the miraculous child’s talent? Mimicry. He could pretend to be the voice of anyone. Anyone. Man or beast. And he could copy their movements, their manners…his master sent him to the actor school, he was so well received. At first, he had to give all his money back to him but soon it became clear that Roscius was his own man. He ended up giving classes to the teachers, who were full of the histrionic Greek shite at that time. Oh yes. Roscius was old Scipio’s great hero. He’d spend hours practising his different voices, hoping to one day make people laugh as much as Roscius had done. Skip failed to note, however, that while Roscius’ career moved always in an upward direction from low Romanised Greek tragedy with clumsy sideswipes at defeated enemies to a new refined art form, his own career, by contrast, as we have seen, was in the process of…well…no matter…

  Now here’s the second story he used to tell when I asked why he chose to nosedive from the security (‘drudgery’ he always insisted) of the Roman legal profession. Well this is a story his grandfather told him, so this would have happened just at the beginnings of the Social War, some twenty years even before Caesar was born. Your grandfather’s grandfather or whatever happened to be watching a show going on in the Town Hall at…er…where was it? Asculum, where the little anti-Roman upstarts were getting full of themselves, because they could never get rid of that old Sabine blood. It was common knowledge ’round here that there was something funny about that lot, so it was quite normal for there to be a strong Roman guard posted there at these types of events, just to keep order among the savages.

  Now the Roman Guards were watching this show and they didn’t much take to one of the local Asculumian – or whatever – actors making them out to be milksop cowards, so after the man had been applauded and carried off the stage by the mob, who thought he was hilarious, and while the next actor was on, some of the Roman guards came up to the clown to tell him what they thought of his act. Only not with pithy observations and verbal criticism in the style of our noted commentators, but with fists and cudgels, and in the end swords.

  News of the actor’s death spread through the crowd and the tension grew just as one of their comedians – I mean the Romans – some Latin guy, who they liked, was coming on. But now of course, all the non-Romans there, that is to say, most of the fuckers, were ready for revenge. So the poor guy has to stagger on and make these people laugh, with a still warm corpse of a local within smelling distance and a deathly silence descending, as he steps onto the skene.

  This is a dead man, gramps was thinking, but, like the rest of the crowd, stood in silence to see what he had to say.

  So, “Hi!” he begins. “I’d just like to say before I begin, that I’m not from here or there…just sort of flit around like a little bird,” And he begins with the bird impression, even some of the people laughing now, and he’s flitting around trying to land and putting his foot down saying, ‘Oh no, not there, Sullus is watching,’ or ‘Best not tell jokes about Cicero,’ and that kind of thing and by the thunder of Jupiter, the clown is going down well.

  Unfortunately, over by the murder scene, the locals have managed to gather up a vigilante group and as the brave comic stumbles through a couple more jokes, up goes the crowd in one almighty blood-soaked battle!

  No one knows what happened to the clown. Was he killed? Did he make his way off the stage by some back route and survive? Nobody tells us. What mattered to him was that the hero was a clown. And a clown with big balls.

  And he’s right. Almost every story you hear is of some soldier or lawyer or hero or king, so it’s nice to have a simple comedian at the heart of a story for once. So let’s get on with it. Maybe I will write it as a play some day, as it’s quite an odyssey.

  What? Yes, yes, of course, vale…I’ll begin. You remember we were in the tavern entertaining the soldiers?

  “Good to be back in Rome, eh?” he opens with a broad brush.

  Most of the soldiers roar in approval. The old populism, the easiest trick to get them on your side. “This is the best place in the world, ain’t it, gentlemen? Hurrah!” (As if we’ve all trodden every square yard of the Empire…not to mention the lands beyond. The three-day forest in the north doesn’t offer much, but who knows what lies to the east of Persia? Alexander’s foray still hints at hidden wonders).

  “Don’t worry about this,” he points at the birth mark on the right side of his forehead…“like yours, now that I see it, only bigger… It’s not that I was conceived on an altar,” (some laughs). “You have to admit, it does look like an altar. Table-head they call you, do they? Well, whatever…don’t let it get to you. Turn it to your advantage, like Skip; ‘always open with something self-deprecating…make fun of your appearance’”…he should have written a manual, your uncle. Well…maybe not, given how he ended up…you’ll be the judge…So, on he goes with the show…

  “Rome, eh? Greatest city in the world!” (Cheers at last). “City of Romulus and Remus. That’s what they say. I don’t know if you believe that…have you seen that hut, that’s supposed to be where Romulus actually lived? That one that looks like a public toilet with a roof on it,” (some laughter). “Well, he must have been a small kind of fellow to fit in there…small and thin, a bit like you, sir…” (Good! There’s a tall thin one to hand.) “What do they call you? Beanpole?” (Laughter from Beanpole’s friends). “The Altitudinous One?” (More laughter. This is going well). “What’s the weather like up there?” (Vale, enough now).

  “Ay Romulus…our ‘glorious founder’…you know he wasn’t up to that much. In fact, history tells us he was a bit of cunt. He popped out of Circe after Odysseus fucked her. They say then at the end, he was ‘taken up to heaven in a rain storm’, that’s what the stories tell us
. What are we? Six years old? He got hacked to pieces! It was a cover-up!” (The audience don’t know how much of this is for real.) He trod the line rather well…though I counted at least two ‘here’s one you might likes’. Then he started to rather overdo the laughing-at-Caesar bit. JC was rubbing the long-suffering soldiers up the wrong way, just then…they all wanted to stay put, now that they were back in Rome. A lot of them had been away more than sixteen years, which was more than the term they signed up for (I believe it’s gone up even a few years more since then, with that godly new Caesar replacement. Can you imagine?). Anyhow, the returnees had had it by now and just wanted to settle down, but Caesar was all for one last push to finish off Sextus and Gnaeus and their chums in North Africa. But Scipio, my dear fellow, don’t ever forget that Caesar…and by extension, the Caesars…are Gods to their soldiers…Gods to Rome! It’s official now, joking aside. They are, literally, Gods! If you can believe such a thing.

  But hush hush and on with the gig…When the show’s flagging, go for the populism (now here’s one you might like…).

  “And look at you lot! Heroes!” (Cheers! Good, got them back). “Following the great Julius Caesar as he wa-a-ades chest deep,” (with the accompanying mime, a sort of aquatic Hercules…very funny, even holding imaginary scrolls in the air, you could even imagine the ribbons coming undone and the parchment unfurling…) “Ooh, mustn’t get my important documents wet!” (Very well done. Howls of laughter for the most part, but now some scowls are beginning to appear among certain sectors of the audience.) “Off he goes, sploosh, sploosh through the oceans, until one of you lot has the guts to shout out ‘For the love of Neptune, you lunatic, you can’t go it all alone!’” (Great roars of laughter).