This play is above all else a comedy of manners, which means that it finds humor in the conflict between how one is expected to behave in society on the one hand, and one's individual desires on the other. Wilde wrote this play in the Victorian period which, at least if you belonged or had aspirations of belonging to the upper classes, was a period characterized by strict rules of etiquette and emotional repression.

In the play, Jack is the personification of the conflict between social expectations and personal desires. When he is at his country estate in Hertfordshire he is known as Jack (or John) and he adopts the facade of a respectable Victorian gentleman ("one has to adopt a very high moral tone"), but when he is in London he goes by the name of Ernest and lives a life of pleasure ("Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring one anywhere?").

The comic appeal of Jack's double life is firstly that it inevitably leads to confusion and farce, which an audience might enjoy all the more given that we sometimes know more than some of the characters on the stage (a technique known as dramatic irony).

Secondly, Jack’s double life exposes the insincerity and shallowness of the social conventions that the upper classes are expected to uphold. In this way Jack is essentially Wilde’s mouthpiece. Through Jack, Wilde is highlighting the dishonesty of social conventions (“It is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth”). This then is satire, and is comically appealing because it draws upon social experiences and situations with which everyone is personally familiar.

"The Importance of Being Earnest" is a comedy which criticises its society's practices and customs.  Some of the comedic elements is Lady Bracknell's monologue on being an invalid.  The play also incorporates situational irony, when both Jack and Algernon want to be named Ernest and end up being brothers at the end of the play.  The witty repartee between Jack and Algernon about love in Act 1 also add to the comedy.  The play uses many play on words and puns (or double meanings) in order to achieve a comedic affect.

Analyze the comic appeal of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde.

Algernon. Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?
Lane. I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.
Algernon. I’m sorry for that, for your sake.  I don’t play accurately—any one can play accurately—but I play with wonderful expression.  As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte.  I keep science for Life.

Wilde produces comic appeal through a number of literary devices, chief among which is ironic hyperbole. The quote above, the lines that open the play, are good examples of this. Irony is a literary trope that twists words or events around so that the ordinarily expected meaning or outcome is replaced by meaning or event that is not expected. Example: saying "Thank you so much," to someone who does not help you look for your prescription glasses.

Hyperbole is the rhetorical and literary device of exaggeration. Events and statements are made to appear of be larger than they are, more elaborate than they are. Wilde employs irony in combination with hyperbole to create comic effect and appeal.

In the lines above, Lane and Algernon are in adjoining rooms with open doors. What occurs in one room must surely be audible in the next room. Yet, when Algernon asks if Lane had heard his piano plying, Lane replies with an implied negative giving the excuse that he thought it would be impolite to listen. This is both ironic (how does one not listen to the piano played loudly in the adjoining room?!) and hyperbolic because it is an hyperbolic exaggeration of the standards of polite living. Thus a great start to a comedic play.

A particular forte in Wilde's repertoire of devices is that of logical fallacy. In the quote above, Algernon takes (1) pleasure in playing piano--an exact performance skill--inaccurately and (2) pride in being wonderfully expressive while inaccurate. As a result of Wilde's impeccable mastery of vocabulary and tone, the characters do say the most unlikely things in the most serious and straightforward of manners.

Algernon. ... may I dine with you to-night at Willis’s?
Jack. I suppose so, if you want to.
Algernon. Yes, but you must be serious about it.  I hate people who are not serious about meals.  It is so shallow of them.

What is the comic appeal of "The Importance of Being Earnest"?

Earnest is descended from the great comic tradition.  Like Shakespeare's comedies (particularly , A Midsummer Night's Dream), Earnest gives us:

• A struggle of old haters to overcome difficulty, often presented by young people
• Separation and re-unification
• Mistaken identities
• A clever servant
• Heightened tensions, often within a couple
• One, intertwining plot
• Frequent punning

Earnest is the blueprint for the modern romantic comedy.  It presages the television sitcom--the most dominant form of drama in our media age.  Earnest contains the same wit and humor of Will and Grace, in particular.  It is coded satire on sexuality.  It is an absurd love triangle.  Who loves who?  Who is gay?  Who is straight?  It's like a situational merry-go-round, fodder for an entire series of sitcoms.

It is perhaps the best example of Horatian satire ever staged.  Wilde expertly parodies the "novel of manners" in form and function: the double movement of a ciy man trying to escape the illegitimate and frivolous Victorian society contrasted with the country man who escapes to the city to find a mate works as high and low comedy.

Wilde's voice shines through his characters; his puns, verbal irony, and epigrams--in context or by themselves--ring so true.  As they say, "Irony is militant." His epigrams are funny and yet words to live by.  Algernon says, “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.”  Wilde presages the information age, the bombardment of words and images.  We could easily change "read" to "watch" or "speak" and the message would ring true.  Wilde knew that we would be victims of an overload of rhetoric which drains us and our language of meaning.