Preview

Penny Gay Defines Comedy as a Genre Where Words Are More Important Than Actions, How Far Does Wilde’s the Importance of Being Earnest Support This View.

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1216 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Penny Gay Defines Comedy as a Genre Where Words Are More Important Than Actions, How Far Does Wilde’s the Importance of Being Earnest Support This View.
The comedy of the Importance of Being Earnest uses spoken language to convey comical actions rather than physical actions. The Importance of Being Ernest is a drama because of its origins as a play, but also a contextual comedy as the characters follow the general format of falling in love with each other and ending with the idea of marriage. However, the play is also very satirical, making light of the aristocratic classes, exaggerating the upper-class morals and the frivolity of the characters.
The satire that is portrayed in the play is very obvious, however today requires to match with the context of the times, Wilde’s satire is centered in the aristocratic lives of the Victorian social system, this is first recognised when Algernon first introduced, immediately posed as a hypocrite, eating cucumber sandwiches that he told Jack not to eat, Algernon is also narcissistic , when at the piano he states that “I don’t play accurately - any one can play accurately - but I play with wonderful expression.” This shows how The Importance of Being Earnest supports Penny Gay’s view by instantly portraying the character as a self-centered aristocrat, by this point in the play there has been one stage direction, showing that Wilde was more interested in what the character said rather than how the character acted, this can be further seen when Algernon says to Lane “I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane.” Further showing Algernon’s self centered attitudes, however this is quickly changed when he meets Cecily, calling her “the visible personification of absolute perfection.” Showing the hypocritical nature of the characters. Wilde uses this as a way of creating comedy by showing the corrupt morals of Algernon and infact Cecily, who will only marry a man named Ernest. The satire is more comedic in comparison to most comedies that involved shrouding the narcissism of the main character, such as in Wilde’s The Picture Of Dorian Gray where the Dorian,

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The Importance of Being Earnest is a comical drama using multiple types of irony to ridicule marriage, death, and birth.…

    • 490 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ is considered to be Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece written in 1895. His work here involves mistaken identity, satire (social/class rankings), incredible wit and much more. It is theorised that this script was written in slight reflection of Wilde’s own life; he himself led a double life due to his sexuality.…

    • 1034 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest follows Jack and Algernon, two young men living in Victorian England, whose attempts to court Gwendolen and Cecily are complicated by the fictitious identities they have created to escape social obligations. Over the course of the play, their various deceptions are exposed and things get further and further out of hand until a timely revelation brings the matter to a resolution. This play is primarily a satire that serves as a vehicle for Wilde to mock what he sees as the silliness and shallowness of Victorian society.…

    • 836 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest provides a satirical view of the Victorian era, primarily focusing on Victorian standards of marriage and social expectations. Wilde builds his critique of Victorian morality through his humor and wit between the character’s banter, the hypocritical Victorian view of honesty.…

    • 672 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Oscar Wilde is known as a comedic playwright to much of the world, although his plays address issues with contemporary society in a nonchalant way by turning these issues into a joke. In The Importance Of Being Earnest Wilde uses irony and mockery to ridicule the narcissistic attitude of the victorian aristocracy as well as to expose their hypocrisy, ridiculous social norms, and their sheer stupidity that results in a myriad of silly and funny situations.…

    • 201 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Through the play, “we are made to share Wilde’s view of the ludicrous and sinister realities behind the fashionable façade of an over-civilized society where nothing serious is considered serious and nothing trivial trivial” (Reinert 17). In the interactions between people who subscribe to Victorianism, such as Gwendolen and Cecily, the trivial matter of addressing each other while having a conversation is turned into a manner of enormous social importance. In contrast, in the interactions between people who subscribe to Bunburyism, or the total rejection of Victorianism, matters as serious as pretending to have a dead brother Ernest or sick friend Bunbury are treated lightly. Gwendolen and Cecily’s Victorianism leads them to become enraged at each other without reason, while Jack and Algernon’s Bunburyism very nearly leads to their mutual loss of the women whom they love. In this way, Wilde shows that moral ideals should lie in the middle between Bunburyism and Victorianism because of the consequences of taking both ideas of extremes (Reinert 18). Jack sums up the moral best in the last line of the play when he proclaims that he has “now realized the vital Importance of Being Earnest” (Earnest 313). Through this play, Wilde states that the key to success is to simply behave without thought for social…

    • 995 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The play “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is one of the most perfect examples of satire in our culture. Although it is set in England, it makes fun of the upper class. The play uses dramatic irony to show how Oscar Wilde sees the upper class as too formal and snobbish. It is dramatic irony because the characters in the play obviously think that they are high class with their multiple houses and butlers even though the author thinks that the upper class is too snobbish.…

    • 785 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Importance of Being Earnest was Oscar’s fourth comedy, and it was to be his last and most outstanding play. ‘The Trivial Comedy for Serious People‘ (in earlier drafts, ‘serious comedy for trivial people’) was first produced by George Alexander at the St James’s Theatre on 14th February 1895 in London. The play was reduced from four to three acts (Raby 161-163).…

    • 2157 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Often times, authors and playwrights write characters and plots based on life experiences. These ordeals can very much alter one’s life and the perception of it. Author and playwright Oscar Wilde is no exception to this; with the many experiences that his own life holds, such as his double identity and homosexuality in the Victorian Era, Wilde is able to write his autobiography as a novel or play using characters similar to ones in his own life, as he has. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon Moncrieff defies the Victorian upper class society by using his alter egos, Bunbury and Ernest, to appropriate his bad behavior and ultimately obtain what his desires. Algernon is a reflection of the play’s author Oscar Wilde as he learns about the importance of truth while working through his society-shaped id, ego, and superego. Faced with making decisions that align with Sigmund Freud’s psyche model, Wilde successfully breathes himself into Algernon while satirizing the society in which he grew up.…

    • 1126 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    How serious can we take The Importance of Being Earnest as being a play that criticizes social norms and values?…

    • 1487 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The use of comedy helps bring books, movies and plays to life. In some cases, it is even written around the idea of comedy itself. The play Importance of Being Earnest written by Oscar Wilde criticizes the aspect of the aristocratic life in the Victorian era by making fun of them with a term called satire. In the play, Wilde creatively uses three different types of irony. These being: verbal, dramatic and situational forms of irony. Each form of irony is used to mock the behavior and status of the characters, depending on their character and position in the society.…

    • 830 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Discuss the use of duplicity and subterfuge for comic affect in The importance of being earnest. The importance of being Ernest written in 1899 by Oscar wild is a comedy of manners which was first shown to the Victorian society. Being a comedy of manners, the play includes many features of a Victorian melodrama including confusion, mistaken identity and a final happy ending. However subterfuge and duplicity is inherent in all characters and is the main source of comic value within the plot. We see the comic value of subterfuge and duplicity not only within the main characters and the cameo roles but also heavily embedded within the plot to highlight wild's attack on the hypocrisy of upper class Victorian society. Within the plot of The importance of being earnest nobody is who they appear to be and that is what plants the seed for the humour. All the confusion and farce that is creates right before your very eyes creates a comprehensive amount of dramatic irony for the audience to sit and laugh at, little did they know however that they are laughing at a mirror image of themselves. From the butlers - Lane and Merriman - to the very top predators of the Victorian social society such as Lady Bracknell, they all have a measurement of deceit hidden within them - all rising in amount - to reflect their social status. Other than the characters the whole plot created by wild was intended to exploit the hypocrisy of the Victorian social society. This theme of exposing the upper class you find in all the characters within the play.…

    • 2043 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    In the play, Wilde achieves most of his humour through the wonderfully satiric characters, however in the film Parker represents them as being far more farcical. Throughout the Wilde’s play Algernon, Jack, Gwendolen, Cecily and Lady Bracknell all speak quite candidly of their thoughts and views of society. Although they do not realise it, their views do not grant them any merit, and only exemplify their flaws. Algernon’s opinion that “it is awfully hard work doing nothing” followed by “however, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any kind” is an example of how he has no concept of what “hard work” is, yet he believes that he does, and the audience laughs at the satire of it. In Parker’s film, while some of these lines remain the same, the satire in them is overshadowed by their farcical nature. Cecily’s vivid daydreams where Algernon is dressed as a knight in shining armour, Gwendolen’s tattoo of the name ‘Ernest’ on her backside and Algernon and Jack’s duet of ‘Lady Come Down’ are the scenes the audience remembers most, and sadly none of them are in the original. Because Wilde’s satire relies on the characters behaving with dignity, scenes like these in Parker’s film destroy all sense of dignity in these characters, and consequently there is no longer any satire. The loss of satire not only lowers the standard of comedy, but it also means that Wilde’s…

    • 1427 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    "The tone says life is fun. The undertone suggests life is a catastrophe. " How far do you agree with this model of comedy in relation for The Importance of Being Earnest?- Edward Braddock. The Importance of Being Earnest has been described in many ways, some believing that its dialogue is "wittily allusive and understated rather than downright comic" , whereas others believe it is simply a narrative driven by Wilde's deep roots in the Aestheticism movement. Despite the play being a comedy where the status quo remains when the curtain falls, the jovial and fun tones the play appears to have are paralleled by dark undertones- some more subtle than others.…

    • 1579 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest tells the story of two gentlemen who lead a double life under the name “Earnest” in order to win the hearts of their love interests.The play premiered in London’s St. James’ Theater in 1895 and is now performed in theaters throughout the world because of its timeless humor and whit. In his play The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde employs the use of satire to convey his criticism towards Victorian society’s views on marriage, deceit and duality, and gender roles.…

    • 1153 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays