The Roman Banana Peel Gag

Let’s get one thing straight: Roman mimes weren’t your kid’s birthday party nightmare in a striped shirt. These were *artistes*. The *Infamia*, they called their guild—the “Scandalous Ones”—and they were the silent, serious interpreters of epic poetry and grim historical tragedies. Their whole deal was making the plebs weep buckets over the death of Hector using nothing but interpretive dance and some very intense glares. But by 44 BC, the only thing making anyone weep was the goddamn drought, and the fact that one Senator Gaius “The Gout” Flaccus was famously embezzling the aqueduct repair budget to fund his truly spectacular collection of solid gold chamber pots.

Morale in the *Infamia* was lower than a snake’s balls in a ditch. Their guild leader, an perpetually exasperated man named Scipio “Scrappy” Lentulus, was trying to stage a heartfelt—and silent, of course—rendition of *The Rape of the Sabine Women*. You know, high-brow stuff. During rehearsal, an actor named Titus, playing a particularly grabby Roman soldier, was supposed to dramatically seize a Sabine maiden. But thanks to the city-wide water rationing, the stage hadn’t been properly washed in weeks and was slick with a patina of spilled wine, olive oil, and something horrifyingly unidentifiable. Titus slipped, shot across the stage like a greased-up bowling ball, and slammed directly into a prop altar, which then toppled onto another actor, who proceeded to fall backwards off the stage with the grace of a dropped anvil.

There was a moment of horrified silence. This was *art*, damn it. This was classy tragedy. And then, from the back of the theatre, a young apprentice started laughing. Not a chuckle. A full-throated, donkey-braying, tears-streaming-down-his-face howl. Scrappy Lentulus stomped over to verbally flay the little bastard, but then he stopped. He looked at the chaos on stage—the splintered altar, the groaning actors, Titus staring at his own feet in betrayal—and a truly devious thought sparked in his conniving little artist’s brain. They couldn’t *say* Senator Flaccus was a corrupt, bloviating sack of shit. But they could *show* it.

They scrapped *The Rape of the Sabine Women* (a relief to everyone, frankly) and debuted a new show: *The Stumbling of the Senator*. The star was a new character, “Goutius Maximus,” a pompous dignitary in a too-tight toga who couldn’t walk three feet without tripping over his own sandals, getting bonked on the head by a comically oversized scroll, or slipping on a strategically placed pile of discarded figs. The finale involved Goutius falling face-first into a large vat of (thankfully fake) pig slop, intended to be a trough for the Capitoline geese. The audience was stunned for about ten seconds, then the laughter started. It was a tidal wave. For the first time in months, Rome wasn’t miserable; it was united in mockery of that thieving prick Flaccus.

Of course, it changed nothing. Flaccus kept his gold-plated crappers and Rome stayed thirsty for another year. But the *Infamia* became legends. They’d invented a whole new genre: *comoedia de lapsu*—literally, “comedy from falling down.” It was crude, it was stupid, and it was the most honest political commentary in the Republic. Politicians learned to dread not the assassin’s knife, but the sight of a mime taking notes on their particular way of walking. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but a well-aimed cream pie—or in this case, a hurled head of cabbage—is mightier than both.