![]() ![]() From the time of the Greeks, it has invited us to engage in the communal pleasure of laughing with others, as well as the sharper,and sometimes darker, pleasure of laughing at the expense of something or someone else. This is how audiences knew in 1895 and still know Comedy is a genre focused on pleasure. For Wilde’s protagonists, the worst result of being caught indulging oneself is the temporary inconvenience of having to come up with an engaging lie (or a wittily phrased truth) to avoid the consequences. Throughout The Importance of Being Earnest, pleasure is identified with escape from conventional expectations and and embracing instead the principle of doing as one likes. Everything that happens in this play turns on the question of pleasure, as one character after another affirms the attraction of it, interrogates the meaning of it, and either announces or denounces the goal of pursuing it. But no comedy in history has been as concerned with the issue of pleasure itself as Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest-a subject to which it is more devoted than Gwendolen Fairfax is to bread and butter and certainly far more than Jack Worthing is to Gwendolen. From the time of the Greeks, it has invited us to engage in the communal pleasure of laughing with others, as well as the sharper, and sometimes darker, pleasure of laughing at the expense of something or someone else. ![]() An Afternoon Tea by Federico Andreotti (1847-1930).Ĭomedy is a genre focused on pleasure. ![]()
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