Ernie Dyson - wonderful old Yorkshireman who used to do recitations - usually in dialect, often very funny, sometimes parodies.
One day I saw him at Whitby. He began by declaiming the opening verse of Macauley's How Horatius Kept The Bridge. 'Aha!' I thought, 'A witty parody coming up.' By the end of verse two I was thinking that he was taking his time getting to the parody. Halfway through verse three it began to dawn on us that he was going to do the poem straight. The whole poem. All seventy verses of it.
In fact he didn't do seventy verses. It was more like eighty, because he kept forgetting the words and would go back a verse or two in order, in his words, to 'get a run at it.'