Wilde Jokes

Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” is full of witty humour, satire, sarcasm and puns – something quite outrageous to be performed in a play in Victorian England.

My favourite line, said by Algernon, is: “the only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she’s pretty, and to someone else if she’s plain.” I find it absolutely hilarious, and burst into uncontrollable peals of laughter in the middle of class when my classmates acted the scene out. It was quite ridiculous, really. I think the reason why I find it so hilarious could be because of the outrageousness of the line. Can you imagine this being said to an audience in the Victorian times? They’d be so horrified by the vulgar nature of that sentence. Possibly also from the vulgar nature of the entire play, but that is what makes it so brilliant. One simply doesn’t tell other men to make love to other women if their wife is ugly, that’s simply unheard of, even in modern times. Algernon said this so matter-of-factly, so calmly and literally that he didn’t seem to understand the absurdity of what he said, let alone the fact that making love to women you aren’t wed to is frowned upon by mostly everybody (except for the occasional weirdo).

Another line that I found hilarious was the conversation between Lady Bracknell and Jack when discussing his suitability to marry Gwendolen. The conversation goes a lot like this:

I suppose that in the Victorian times it was common for men to smoke, but nowadays smoking is somewhat frowned on, and it’s almost absurd for a woman to approve of her potential son-in-law’s smoking habits. The fact that Lady Bracknell also comes down on Jack like a hawk and grills him on his life is very comical and somewhat unladylike, making her seem like a very stern policeman questioning a suspect of a crime.