A Review of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
Purwanto, S.S., M.Hum.
Abstract
Oscar Wilde is renowned for his works rich in social criticism and sparkling with irony. His wit, often cynical and epigrammatic, serves as both entertainment and critique of the moral pretensions of Victorian society. This article examines the function of cynical wit in The Importance of Being Earnest, one of Wilde’s most celebrated plays, and considers how humor becomes a medium for social reflection.
Keywords: cynical wit, social criticism, drama, comedy
Introduction
Comedy, as both entertainment and social commentary, allows audiences to confront human folly through laughter. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, comedy may refer to: 1. “Entertainment consisting of jokes and sketches intended to make an audience laugh; a film, play, or programme intended to arouse laughter.” 2. “A play with a humorous or satirical tone, in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity.”
It is this latter definition that best captures the spirit of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Beyond merely amusing its audience, the play offers a humorous but incisive commentary on the conventions and hypocrisies of the Victorian upper class. Wilde employs wit, irony, and satire not only to provoke laughter but also to expose the absurdities underlying social institutions, particularly marriage.
Laughter, as the old adage claims, is the best medicine. A well-crafted comedy not only entertains but also enlightens, allowing readers to laugh not only at fictional characters but at their own follies as well. As Morton Gurewitch observes in Comedy: The Irrational Vision, “Humorous comedy not only tolerates man’s proneness to make mistakes, but even cherishes his fallible biases and pities” (p. 85). In this sense, comedy offers a form of moral therapy. Instead of lamenting human weakness, it transforms error into insight. Wilde’s comedy, built upon a foundation of epigrams and cynical witticisms, exemplifies this function perfectly.
Wilde’s use of the epigram, a concise, ironic statement exposing human weakness, is central to his comedic art. As Guy E. Smith defines it in English Literature to Romanticism, the epigram “tends to be humorous and ironical, usually defining some human foible or social weakness in a terse, satirical manner” (p. 309). Through this stylistic device, Wilde delivers his criticism in forms that are simultaneously elegant and subversive. His epigrams conceal sharp social critique beneath laughter, enabling him to mock conventions without moral preaching.
Comedy, Language, and Social Criticism
The use of comedy as a vehicle for social criticism is evident throughout The Importance of Being Earnest. While other literary genres can articulate critique more directly, comedy achieves this through laughter, making criticism both palatable and penetrating. As Gurewitch notes, “Humor seeks, not to expunge folly, but to condone and even to bless it, for humor views folly as endearing, humanizing, indispensable” (p. 9). Wilde’s humor functions precisely in this spirit, it exposes societal absurdities while inviting audiences to laugh at their inevitability.
Through the character of Algernon Moncrieff, Wilde gives voice to his sharpest epigrams and most cynical observations. Algernon’s wit embodies Wilde’s critique of marriage, romance, and social pretension. In one of the play’s most memorable lines, Algernon declares:
“I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be
in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal... The very
essence of romance is uncertainty.”
This remark distills Wilde’s skepticism toward the institution of marriage. For Algernon, and by extension, for Wilde, marriage marks not the fulfillment of romance but its death. The humor of the statement arises from its inversion of moral expectations: the proposal, an act traditionally celebrated as romantic, becomes instead an emblem of boredom and conformity. Beneath the laughter lies a subversive observation about how Victorian society reduces love to a matter of certainty and social arrangement.
The dialogue between Algernon and Jack Worthing reinforces this critique through wordplay and idiom. When Algernon refers to “bread and butter,” he implies the material obligations, income and social standing, that underlie proposals of marriage. This economic dimension is further explored through the character of Lady Bracknell, whose interrogations of Jack reveal the mercenary logic of the upper class:
Lady Bracknell: “What is your income?”
Jack: “Between seven and eight thousand a year.”
Lady Bracknell: “In land, or in investments?”
Here, Wilde exposes the transactional nature of Victorian courtship. Later, when she inquires about Cecily Cardew’s fortune upon learning that her nephew Algernon wishes
to marry
her, Lady Bracknell’s materialism reaches comic absurdity:
Lady Bracknell: “A hundred and thirty thousand pounds! And in the Funds! Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her.”
Her change of opinion upon discovering Cecily’s wealth exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of upper-class morality. In another instance, Lady Bracknell remarks: “I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.”
The inversion, where ignorance is preferable to understanding, ridicules the superficiality of Victorian morality. Through such characters, Wilde dismantles the moral pretensions of his age. His humor, though light in tone, carries the weight of social observation.
Cynical Wit and Freud’s Theory of Humor
Wilde’s deployment of wit corresponds with what Sigmund Freud terms “tendentious wit.” In Comedy: The Irrational Vision, Gurewitch cites Freud’s classification: “Freud discerns four kinds of tendentious wit: obscene, hostile, cynical, and skeptical... but hostile wit attacks individuals only, while cynical wit assaults institutional values (or persons symbolizing them)” (p. 55). Cynical wit, then, functions as an attack not on individuals but on the social systems they represent. Wilde’s satire targets the institutions of marriage, class hierarchy, and gender relations, pillars of Victorian respectability.
As Freud observes, cynical wit also carries a therapeutic dimension: “Cynical wit remains an essential mode of therapy in an epoch not yet equipped to treat all the sores created by the pathology of the social structure” (p. 58). In this light, The Importance of Being Earnest may be read as both comic entertainment and cultural therapy. By transforming social criticism into laughter, Wilde allows audiences to recognize the absurdity of their conventions without succumbing to bitterness.
Cynical Wit and the Modern Situation Comedy
Wilde’s legacy extends beyond the theater into modern popular culture. The spirit of his cynical wit persists in the structure and dialogue of contemporary situation comedies (sitcoms). Like Wilde’s plays, sitcoms rely on irony, verbal repartee, and humorous contradiction to expose the follies of everyday life. However, the tone of modern sitcoms often differs from Wilde’s refined irony. While Wilde used humor as a vehicle for moral and aesthetic reflection, many television comedies prioritize entertainment over enlightenment. Yet the best examples of the genre, those that balance humor with insight, owe much to Wilde’s pioneering blend of cynicism and compassion. His influence reminds us that laughter can illuminate as well as amuse.
Conclusion
In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde fuses humor, irony, and satire into a distinctive form of cynical wit that exposes the contradictions of Victorian society. His comedy targets not individuals but institutions, the conventions of marriage, class, and decorum that define social life. Through laughter, Wilde invites audiences to recognize the absurdities they uphold, transforming ridicule into reflection.
As Freud and Gurewitch suggest, cynical wit performs a therapeutic function. It enables society to confront its hypocrisies indirectly, with humor softening the blow of truth. Wilde’s brilliance lies in his ability to make criticism delightful, to conceal rebellion beneath elegance, and wisdom beneath laughter. In doing so, he establishes comedy not as mere diversion but as a mode of moral insight.
Wilde’s art demonstrates that to laugh at folly is not to dismiss it, but to understand it. In his world, laughter becomes a form of freedom, an affirmation that, even within the constraints of convention, the human spirit remains joyously subversive.
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References
Gurewitch, Morton. Comedy: The Irrational Vision. Cornell University Press, 1975.
Henry, Lewis C. (ed.). Best Quotations for All Occasions. A Premier Book, 1961.
“Quotations and Sayings: Oscar Wilde.” quotesandsayings.com.
Smith, Guy E. English Literature to Romanticism, Volume I. Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1959.
The Importance of Being Earnest Online Text, intuitive.com/library/BeingEarnest.shtml.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. Online Edition, Project Gutenberg.
Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Plays, Poems, Novels and Stories. The Book Company, 1995.
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