Don't Speak ill of the Dead - Paddy's Wake and the cycle of myth making: Comedy's ability to expose invention, reinvention and disruption of the prevailing Irish Myth of the 'self made man'.

“Never speak ill of the dead” combines a seven-minute performance of Paddy’s Wake, by Niamh Malone and Sheila McCormick, and a fourteen-minute contextualising paper reflecting on social performance as public mythologizing. Performance: Paddy’s Wake, by Niamh Malone and Sheila McCormick Contextualising Paper: The Two Marys attend Paddy’s wake, lamenting the passing of a prominent member of Bailegandeora’s small, tightly knit community in the West of Ireland. In the aftermath of economic boom and bust, Paddy is a representative figure of the Irish self-made man (1992-2008). Paddy’s Wake is indebted to Tom Murphy’s appropriation of storytelling forms in A Thief of a Christmas and Bailegangaire. Specifically, the Two Marys inhabit a world of comic grotesque, in which parodic strategies are deployed to expose the ‘gap between life as it is lived and life as it is narrated’ (Kearney 2002). The Two Marys lavish formal expressions of praise on the departed Paddy, rehearsing the preferred public narrative of his greatness. Their sycophancy reaches a level of grotesque enthusiasm which enables a cutting exposé of his predatory venality to emerge. If, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase (1936), ‘the storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself’, Paddy’s Wake demonstrates that in the performance of story, the audience may encounter the social construction of good and evil alike