Remember when Baldwin would host an episode of SNL and there would inevitably be a sketch with three or four guys and Baldwin cupping brandy snifters and spinning yarns of a Paul Bunyanesque character, going by the name Bill Brasky? ('Speaking of 'im, he once ate a twenty dollar bill and passed change for a hundred, all in two dollar bills.' ) Anyway, that sketch is top quality in my list.
But more than being the best sketch ever, it also reminds me of the Cyclops chapter of Ulysses in which a nameless narrator (known only as "I", read: 'eye') passes the time in Barney Kiernan's with Joe Hynes, Leopold Bloom, Bob Doran, Alf Bergan, and a red headed red bearded "sinewyarmed hero" known as 'the citizen'.
The blokes in Barney Kiernan's pass the time in usual pub fashion: by 'shooting the shit' about the locals, passing along drunken gossip, and-- of course--drinking themselves blind. And as they drink, their stories become the more inflated and gargantuan. Such as narrator's rendition of the aftermath of the citizen throwing a biscuit tin:
"The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli's scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year of the rebellion of Silken Thomas. The epicentre appears to have been that part of the metropolis which constitutes the Inn's Quay ward and parish of Saint Michan covering a surface of fortyone acres, two roods and one square pole or perch. All the lordly Tesidences in the vicinity of the palace of justice were demolished and that noble edifice itself, in which at the time of the catastrophe important legal debates were in progress, is literally a mass of ruins beneath which it is to be feared all the occupants have been buried alive. " (U12.281)
This is Joyce's technique for the episode, and the intended meaning is the 'egocidal terror'. Identity, description, male speech (not one female speaks in the entire episode): these are all things Joyce weaves into the text to show how seeing with only one eye (Cyclops) affects the narration.
As for Bill Brasky, the story telling techniques employed by the drunk salesmen are exactly the same. Their descriptions of Brasky begin as improbable, and slowly through the fuel of drink and oneupmanship inflate to giant proportions. Brasky's height and weight usually begin 6'4" 280 lb and by the end of the skit he goes about 7'8" 530 lb, much like the Citizen described as "from shoulder to shoulder he measured several ells..." (U12.243).
Below is what I think the best representative of the skit and the technique Joyce uses:
Also, it seems Brasky has a bit of Finnegan in him:
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