The audience joined Emil for the ‘just watching my eyelids, baas’ punchline. ‘Just watching my eyelids, baas’ was Sixpence’s catchphrase, and had proved so popular that a line of T-shirts with the catchphrase printed on them seemingly could not be produced fast enough.

Tom was aware that he had resorted to stereotype in order to portray the two Africans, but he knew on which side his bread was buttered. He consoled himself with the fact that his Emil – a deluded fool who thought too highly of himself and believed too sincerely in his own intelligence – was also the worst kind of white man. Tom had hoped, however, that some members of his audience would pick up on the satire and realise that the joke ran both ways. They, forever beneath him and many steps behind him, never really picked up on the irony of the act. Never had and never would because they had not been reared to understand nuance, and more was the pity. He performed his act mostly in bars with carpeted floors smelling strongly of spilled beer and stale tobacco and faintly of stewing piss, so what did he expect?

Tom would have given up the act years ago, but the audience had kept on coming and growing, especially after the recording of his popular skit titled ‘Emil in the back of the bakkie’ in which, at a braaivleis, Emil, who has a cold, recounts the story of how he came to have a cold. The story involves him driving Sixpence and Lobengula to the bush to do some hunting. On their way, they sit in the back of the bakkie and Emil and his Alsatian, Johnny Boy, sit in the front. In the bush, Sixpence and Lobengula find ways not to do any work. On the way back, after spotting a greying cloud, Sixpence tells Emil that he can drive better than Lobengula, and Lobengula says that he is the better driver. They decide that perhaps the best thing is for each of them to drive the bakkie at intervals, and let the baas decide. Emil agrees, and finds himself sitting in the back of the bakkie with his Alsatian, Johnny Boy, just as the rain cloud bursts open. The skit cannot end here, of course, because then the joke would be squarely on Emil. It ends with Sixpence and Lobengula coming up with the brilliant idea of jointly driving the car so as to get home faster, at which point they succeed in driving into a ditch.

Tom Fortenoy had long been a drunk, but he liked to think that he had become a more devout one thanks to the increased popularity of his one-man show.