“What does your family tree look like, a stump?” – Bill Hicks

Unholy labyrinth: the Hapsburg family "tree"

Most pool owners will generally perform routine checks to ensure that their urban lagoon is not stagnating, digesting F-grade flying insects, or harbouring a carnival of diseases left behind by extended family members’ quiet dispensal of bodily fluids into the tureen of fun.

Similarly, most gene pool members will perform routine checks to ensure that any bodily fluids less quietly released into their downstairs tureen are not in fact a gift from a dreamboat who also answers to “cousin”, “uncle”, “grandmother”, or all three.

Not so the Hapsburgs, who braided their DNA strands together until their dreg progeny couldn’t chew a raindrop off his own tongue.

It’s true that double-, triple-, and septuple-barrelled names are a hassle for everyone, especially when you have to hustle to sign the marriage papers and nab your brother before your mother can – again. Being able to scrawl “Hapsburg⁵” with your nub-hand was increasingly convenient as the ability to remember degenerated in tandem with the ability to close your face.

But we exaggerate… mildly. Of course, keeping it in the family is a friendly concept to many of the royal houses of Europe, but none ran quite so fast off the cliff with it than the withered Spanish arm of the Hapsburgs, an Austro-Hungarian mega-clan who for hundreds of years had their apparently superior genes stationed across half the continent. In their fiery Mediterranean way, the Spanish Hapsburgs appeared to make an intergenerational pact not only to preserve untainted their sparkling gene pool, but to make a sprinting eugenic tour of the entire evolutionary cycle. Sadly the tour was badly signposted and devolution rapidly and unattractively gave way to extinction.

By the time Charles #2 grasped the sticky baton in his claw, he was a hobbling cocktail of genes so closely linked that he was effectively the last three generations of his family rolled – badly – into one malfunctioning body. Known as El Hechizado – The Hexed – to those innocents blaming sorcery rather than the black art of intra-familial rutting, Charles was afflicted with mental disorders and probably had a bit of a time saying his own name thanks to the unfortunate face assembly to which he was, unwittingly, to give that name. Laugh? I nearly married my uncle.

Charles the Sequel: fortunate to be sexing anyone

Upon Charles’ pokey arrival, all those who had for centuries had no other name for their mandibular prognathism were finally spared the indignity of trying to pronounce this by his spectacular specimen of the freshly coined ‘Hapsburg lip’. Charles’ lower jaw was at serious loggerheads with the rest of his face and generally arrived everywhere at least eight seconds before he did. This was probably for the best given that his outsized tongue required a viewing platform.

Some other contenders for the family name included Hapsburg noggin, Hapsburg squits and – presumably nature’s way of calling time on the family punch bowl – Hapsburg blanks. Charles, as impotent as a seedless grape, was unable to impregnate any of his relatives and died without an heir at the age of 39.

Next time you get the runs or pop your cork before the bottle’s chilled, consider working out your family tree; if it looks like something a 3-year-old drew on an Etch A Sketch®, you may want to move into the room down the hall.