Puns are also used during the conversation between Algernon and Jack in town. To accuse Algernon a liar just like dentists who lies about cavities, Jack has said, “My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn’t a dentist. It produces a false impression”. This is very funny because we can see that Jack is also lying about his brother, but he is judging Algernon as if he is a very honest person.
Inversion is also another device that Oscar Wilde uses in the play. Algernon and Lady Bracknell, people who are typical Victorian snobs are arrogant, overly proper, and concerned with money. The first act contains some of Wilde’s greatest epigrams, such as “divorces are made in Heaven” and “In married life, three is company and two is none”. Here, Algernon has encouraged the idea of affairs. The two phrases involve the manipulation of traditional clichés to provide intellectual entertainment by showing how empty those clichés are. Here, Wilde uses satire and epigrams to create humour for the audience…
In act 3, Wilde describes the situation for married women in an equally depressing term. When Lady Bracknell tells of her visit with the recently widowed Lady Harbury, Algernon remarks that he’s heard that “her hair has turned white gold from grief”. The audience anticipates the clichéd response that her hair turned grey or white from sorrow, but Wilde turns the phrase around again, to show her view on marriage. He wants the audiences to understand more about Victorian women like Lady Bracknell or Lady Harbury. She seems to have been trapped in a loveless marriage, the kind Lady Bracknell proposes to arrange for Gwendolen. Now that Lady Harbury’s husband is dead, she is finally free to become who ever she wants and do what she pleases. She feels younger, more attractive and changes her hair colour. While the joke requires that we associate aging and grief, Wilde turns that around associating widowhood, instead, with good hair and joy. This phrase could also be an indication of the new wealth and independence Lady Harbury gained in inheriting her husband’s money.
Language is an importance thing in the play. Yet, the plot also makes the audiences laugh. The situation that the characters get them into and how things get in order again at the end is hilarious. In the first act, after the proposal between Jack and Gwendolen, Jack realized that Gwendolen loves his ‘name’ – Ernest so much, that she thinks, “It is a divine name. It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations”. It is even more humorous that she doesn’t like the name Jack that “it does not thrill, and produces absolutely no vibration”, which makes Jack very worried. The double lives of Algernon and Jack also get more complicated at the end, when both women – Gwendolen and Cecily thought that they were both engaged to Ernest (a fictitious person). Also, when Gwendolen first met Cecily, she said” “Something tells me that we are going to be great friends. I like you already more than I can say. My first impressions of people are never wrong”. This is amusing because Gwendolen repeatedly says that her first opinion of people is never wrong, but they are. Although she claims that, her first impressions change often but her claim of their infallibility never changes. Like Gwendolen, Jack also changed his opinion at the end of the play. Jack says that he was perfectly well aware from the start that he has no brother, that he never had a brother, and that he doesn’t intent to have a brother, not even of any kind. This is ironic because at the end, when Jack figures out that he actually has a brother – Algernon, he’s very happy, and says that he knew he had a brother, that he always said he had a brother.
Besides language and the plot of the play, dramatic irony also gets a laugh out from the audience. Although the audience knows what is happening, the characters in the play are unaware of the truth. Oscar Wilde creates humour out of dramatic irony because it is funny to the audience that they know outcome instead of the characters. It also shows that the characters are too stubborn to learn something new that might help them out. The fictitious brother of Jack has fooled every character in the play, from Dr. Chasuble to Miss Prism, to Gwendolen and Cecily. In addition, because of the fictitious brother - Ernest, in act 2, Gwendolen and Cecily had a fight, because they both thought that they were engaged to Ernest, when the audience knows that neither one of them is. However, dramatic irony appears mostly in act 3, when the audience knows that the characters are ridiculously absurd, but they aren’t aware of the fact. It is very funny when Algernon arrived as Ernest, while Jack came and pretended to be sad because his brother just ‘died’. Moreover, everybody was very surprise that Ernest appeared as soon as Jack talks about his ‘brother’. Near the end of the play, everybody thought that Miss Prism was Jack’s mother.
Behaviour and actions of the characters, mostly Algernon, are also very funny. The audience laughs because of how Algernon eats the cucumber sandwiches, which were made for Lady Bracknell. In addition, when she asked about the sandwiches, he easily got away with it, by blaming everything on Lane. When Gwendolen and Cecily found out about Jack’s and Algy’s real name, Jack was very worried, but Algernon decides to eat muffins. He thinks that eating is the only thing that consoles him. Indeed, when he’s in great trouble, as anyone who knows him intimately will tell him, and he would refuse everything except food and drink…
Every page, every line of dialogue, every character, each symbol and every stage direction in The Importance of Being Earnest show elements of satire. Oscar Wilde seems portrays Victorian society as hypocritical, snobbish and narrow. People are judged by their wealth and the social position of their families. It pokes fun at the aristocracy, the literary world, marriage, English manners and customs, women, men, love, religion and all sorts of other staples in modern society in a funny way. This is why it gets a laugh from the audience. For me, it was a very enjoyable play to read.
