74 (U16.582) Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face.

Cast 74. Page 16, line 582.

　Buck Mulligan at once put on a blithe broadly smiling face. He looked at them, his wellshaped mouth open happily, his eyes, from which he had suddenly withdrawn all shrewd sense, blinking with mad gaiety. He moved a doll’s head to and fro, the brims of his Panama hat quivering, and began to chant in a quiet happy foolish voice:

　—I’m the queerest young fellow that ever you heard.
My mother’s a jew, my father’s a bird.
With Joseph the joiner I cannot agree.
So here’s to disciples and Calvary.

This is from Episode 1. Stephen, Mulligan, and Haines have left the Martello tower and are heading toward the Forty Foot bathing place mentioned in Cast 40. Just as Haines begins talking theology, Mulligan breaks into song.

The passage is thick with adverbs and adjectives, and the descriptive tone suddenly shifts. Mulligan’s movements feel almost like those of a ventriloquist’s dummy or a marionette.

What Mulligan sings is a stanza from The Song of the Cheerful (but slightly sarcastic) Jesus a blasphemous comic song by Oliver St. John Gogarty, Joyce’s friend and the model for Mulligan. Elsewhere in the novel it is referred to as The ballad of joking Jesus. （U16.608）

In 1905, Gogarty sent this poem to Joyce, then living in Trieste, through their mutual acquaintance Vincent Cosgrave. Joyce later quoted it in the novel.(Richard Ellmann, James Joyce)

Shortly before the passage discussed in Cast 71, the apparition of Edward VII also sings a stanza from this song (the third stanza).

EDWARD THE SEVENTH: (Levitates over heaps of slain, in the garb and with the halo of Joking Jesus, a white jujube in his phosphorescent face.)

My methods are new and are causing surprise.
To make the blind see I throw dust in their eyes. 

（U482.4475）

”Ballad” is a song with a story or allegorical meaning, often dealing with heroism, romance, social satire, or politics, and often ending in disaster. In that sense, this song, which ends with the death of Jesus, certainly fits the form.

Jan van Eyck — Annunciation

File:Jan van Eyck - Annunciation - WGA7612.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

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