Joyce, the War, and “The coolest chap our country ever knew”

This essay reconsiders James Joyce’s engagement with war and political conflict through the neglected satirical song “Dooleysprudence”, composed around 1916 amid the crises of the Great War and the Easter Rising. Joyce’s creative reworking of Billy Jerome and Jean Schwartz’s 1901 music-hall number “Mister Dooley” and its ties to Finley Peter Dunne’s Irish-American satire situate the piece within the transatlantic circulation of popular and political humour. By tracing the song’s afterlives in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, the essay reveals a continuous “Dooley lineage” that threads through Joyce’s fiction, shaping his sustained exploration of satire, irony, and dissent. Ultimately, “Dooleysprudence” emerges as another vital piece in the larger puzzle of Joyce’s politics of neutrality and his self-fashioned public stance of scornful detachment.