Joke Told To King Carlos

So, the Holy Roman Emperor, King Carlos, gathers Hernán Cortés, Gonzalo and Fernando Pizarro in the pub
and orders that they regale him with their exploits in the New World.
Whoever makes him laugh the hardest will be gentrified, beatified, lionised.

Cortés kicks the contest off:
“In Mexico I assumed the guise of God, ascended to Tenochtitlan,
a Venice 7000 feet up in the clouds,
dogged by 300 illiterate homesick Spanish
whose ships I scuttled.
In a continent of a hundred million,
I ask about the fate of just two white castaways.

Duplicitous Malinche is indentured as my translator, my mistress while I
carve a path through Aztecs across the Yucatan, twisting the Tlaxcalan;
Tludili comes to the border armed with only diplomacy
He licks his finger and sucks the dirt
he hands round straws to us in our peaked helmets,
carrying sharpened crucifixes, he slits
his wrist and sprinkles blood on the canapés
And to please us, chalks a million squirming slaves,
offers to have their hearts cut out with obsidian blades.
Still we are not appeased. The slaves run screaming into the lake, wash the pigment off their copper skin,
fetch their shields and feathered spears.
Emperor Moctezuma believes I’m a robotic steel God
Blessed with a blunderbuss gifted from above.
I order Malinche to tell him in Nahuatl
that my people suffer from an illness, it’s terminal,
We’ll die without a certain luscious yellow metal.
Ashamed we begged, we fetch pliers to wrench our medicine from Moctezuma’s very skin.
The funniest part, Boss Carlos, is
we forced the Aztecs to forgive us
in our trespass. We cast the first stone.
We were without sin. We had the book
in which it was written


*


Gonzalo Pizarro scoffs, tells Juan Carlos
“Ignore Cortés, for my joke is the side-splittingest.
It is I who must receive the prize.

“I arrived in Peru, marched up into the Amazon, trampling Macchu Picchu
6000 kays trudged through tropical slush
with 6000 sows in a platoon,
and slaves we worked to death. God met
us in the forest and commenced the test:
Starving, desperate, we stole the local folks’ cassava,
gorged on it til our stomachs bloated with gas.
Every forest feature inhospitable to Spaniards, poisonous.
my pockets were stuffed with cinnamon and gold dust –inedible, useless.
Mutiny bisected us – Orellana, my best lieutenant
Forged a life raft with nails made from horseshoes,
Promised he’d be back to save us with a dugout canoe full of food,
But Orellana sailed 5000 kays down the Amazon the wrong way.
We despaired, descended into the primitive, barbaric,
we would eat stakes sliced from the horses’ backs and patch their abscesses
with mud to keep the beasts’ hearts beating.
When God was done mocking us, we backtracked blister-sores
to Ecuador, eating stick insects, and we were not scorned
for failing to find El Dorado and strip the golden skin from him, in fact
we became famed for forging the first economy, see, raping our way back through the country we
bartered our festering syphilitic cocks
for potatoes and smallpox, whether the Amazonians wanted it or not.
They couldn’t resist, King Carlos. That bit’s the funniest.”

*
Then Francisco Pizarro interrupts, Wait’ll you hear this:
“So we clambered up the Andes
Sweating in cotton armour, our abscessed scabs
leaking burning melting cheese.
We oozed pus into the alpaca blankets Atahualpa,
the Sapa Inca, was good enough to offer us.
I declared the arrival of Superior Spanish Renaissance Man by garrotting, in public, his father Huayna Capac.
I charged my slavering warhorse into Atahualpa’s face
This king of ten million who sat on top of a continent
shat his pants, aghast at our parades of alien stallions
unseen beasts from the east, bells chiming in their manes. The Tiwantinsuyu couldn’t withstand
as we sicced our man-eating mastiffs. We raged enough to shake
emeralds from the people’s pockets,
to fill a ransom room with golden goblets.
My friar biffed a bible so hard at Atahualpa
He was thrown from his throne;
One ego and 60 crossbows pinned
ten million men at Cuzco
Mummies were stuffed inside the throats
of saints; we melted temples,
chutnified their culture into a boiling Mestizo gazpacho.

But
drop into San Salvador, Santiago or Quito and laugh your arse off, Carlos, ’cause the best bit is,
they’ve come to idolise us, thanks to the guy you got to sponsor us:
The punchline is ours was a holocaust
endorsed by Jesus.”