Lots of Fun at Finnegan's Wake

At an impressionable age, perhaps seven or eight, I became acquainted with the idea of an Irish wake. The old Irish way, as my dad explained then, was that instead of having a sad ceremony, the wake was a big party. The aim was to emphasize celebration of the deceased’s life, not the difficulty of the passing for those left behind.

Obviously, this does not work for all deaths. And I have since heard from other sources of the “keening” and extremes of grief at traditional Irish wakes as well. Most likely, drawing from my own experience of non-Irish wakes, both extremes are usually present in some degree, along with a lot of confused, muted emotions from distantly related relatives and friends. But from this young age I was sure I wanted an old Irish wake of the loud, uproarious, laughing kind. “Hold your gob and quit your weepin,” my will would say to whoever would be around to read it. “’Tis to be an Irish wake, so. Let there be laughter and silliness. Just don’t let the old dog get too much whiskey in him, the crayture.” Or something like that. Enough to get the idea across.

I guess what I think this says about me, apart from that I was the odd sort of youngster who wanted to plan out his memorial services, is that for a long time I’ve been attracted to that element of Irish storytelling that emphasizes the comic, the life-affirming, and the bloody ridiculous aspects of life. This comes out in the myth of the Irish wake, in which a sad event becomes a cause for laughing, drinking, and gaiety. It also shows up in a big way in the ballad tradition. There are many sad, serious, grim ballads about Ireland’s rough history—“The Foggy Dew,” “The Rising of the Moon,” and “She Moved Through the Fair”—but there are also an extraordinary abundance of absurd, funny songs: “Seven Drunken Nights,” “Brennan on the Moor,” “The Irish Rover.” And perhaps most importantly, many ballads that take something nasty and put it to a tune and to words that make change it into this strange blend of silliness and awareness of the rotten side of life—but any tragedy that could have been made out of the experience is blown all to hell. Examples of this could include ballads such as “Paddy on the Railway,” “Building Up andTearing England Down,” “The Irish Navy.” Each of those takes an unpleasant thing and makes a song out of it that neither turns from the unpleasantness nor bows to it. The subject of the song is laughed at, but it is also not forgotten.

There are some songs which exemplify this dynamic more than others. “The Orange and the Green” is a small act of genius. It takes the tune of “The Rising of the Moon” (see above), an old rebel song, and applies it to the more modern story of the son of a Catholic woman from Cork and a Protestant man from Ulster. The telling of this story is not what you’d expect: no grim lamentation of the Troubles; instead, it’s a rollicking, comical story of growing up in a politically divided household: the son is baptized in two churches and called two different names (Willy by his father, Pat by his father). When by a bad coincidence the father’s and mother’s families finally meet during teatime, we find perhaps my favorite song lyric of all time:

"One day me Ma's relations came round to visit me:
By chance me father's kinfolk were just sitting down to tea.
Well I tried to smooth things over, but they all began to fight,
And being strictly neutral, I punched everyone in sight!"

Of course, there’s some commentary here about the awful, deeply-entrenched division of Ireland between Orange and Green, symbolized by the son’s helplessness to solve his parents’ problem. But that’s not what we feel when listening to the song—we cheer the son on in the ridiculous battle in the parlor room. The story is lifted from tragedy to a strangely potent celebration of life’s vibrant absurdities. There’s not even a hint of barbed humor or dark sarcasm—just the supreme glee of nonsense. The song’s most powerful political statement, if we really must analyze it that way, is in its comedy: the way in which a serious partisan song becomes a silly story, perhaps suggesting the mindlessness of the political divisions.

The song “Finnegan’s Wake,” the story of the ultimate Irish wake, is perhaps the best example of this tradition. The ballad later inspired James Joyce's work by the same name. There’s a tragedy buried in there somewhere, a man dying from drunkenness no less, but it’s buried under many layers of jokes and plucky tunes. The song is exuberant and the chorus calls for a dance. The one character that dares to cry at the wake is told to “hold [her] gob.” And similar to “The Orange and the Green” it ends in a drunken brawl.

(If you’ve listened to no other song, listen to this one. The commentary at the beginning is priceless, but if you must, skip to the song at 0:44.)

Tim Finnegan is resurrected by whiskey being splashed across his dead body—in a masterstroke of comedy, the thing that killed him becomes the thing that brings life to him again. It’s this sort of response to life’s calamities that I wish I could exhibit at all times. Especially since I have a natural tendency towards the dramatic. In many moods, if I can make a sad song out of daily trials—too much Novocaine at the dentist’s office, a struggle to finish an essay, my dog getting knocked around by other neighborhood dogs (even a wicked little Bichon Frise, unfortunately) become tragic stories all too quickly when I’m doing the telling.

The attitude I want is a blend of Kramer’s totally unconscious approach and the balladeer’s conscious reworking of nastiness into silliness. A couple days ago, I did have one small victory in this way: I was driving west on Highway 44 when I became aware that a medium-sized cooler was airborne and arcing towards my car at sixty-five miles per hour. I quickly shifted slightly out of the way, like a baseball batter jerking back from an inside curveball. The trajectory of the cooler was such that it probably was never going to hit me, but it came close, and if there was a car next to me its windshield would have been smashed in. I sped up to the tow truck from which the cooler had came, wanting to make sure the driver was aware of what had happened but not really sure what I would do.  (Was it the sort of situation for which the “finger” was called for?) When I was even with the driver, he smiled broadly in a sort of, “Well, that just happened, huh?” kind of way. I smiled back and waved in a sort of “Yep, you almost just nailed me with a hunk of plastic” kind of way. There’s a ballad in there somewhere.