The Importance of Being Earnest

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
Algernon Moncrieff: The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Life would be quite tedious if it were either.
—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest is an 1895 play by Irish playwright Oscar Wilde. It is a farce on the societal conventions and restrictions of late-Victorian society, and remains enormously popular today.

The play follows the lives of two best friends, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff. Jack lives in the country with his ward, Cecily Cardew, but spends much of his time in London -- where he calls himself "Ernest Worthing," so that he can do as he likes without anything getting traced back to his real identity. Furthermore, as luck would have it, his girlfriend Gwendolen has always dreamed of marrying a man named "Ernest." Algernon finds out Jack's ruse, but keeps Jack's secret for his own mischievous purposes: since he knows that there is no such person as "Ernest Worthing," he can sneak off to Jack's country home and pose as "Ernest Worthing," where he meets and falls in love with Cecily. On the same afternoon as Algernon's jaunt to Jack's estate, the other Ernest Worthing -- Jack -- brings Gwendolen and her mother, Lady Bracknell, to his home to try to talk Lady Bracknell into letting him marry Gwendolen.

It makes... more sense if you actually read it. And keep in mind that Wilde specifically ordered that the comedic script should be acted with the utmost seriousness. Plus the finale ending with the multiple plays on the word/name "Ernest" is much funnier if played seriously.

Tropes used in The Importance of Being Earnest include:
  • Accidental Truth: Jack and Algernon pretend to be brothers, and it turns out they are. Jack also pretends to be named Earnest, and that was the name he was christened as, before he was lost as a baby.
  • All Girls Want Bad Boys: Cecily
  • Ambiguous Syntax: the source of many a pun.

Jack: How you can sit there calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.
Algernon: Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs.

  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Algernon drank a bottle of wine that Jack was saving, then he comes onto and eventually gets engaged to his ward Cecily, stays for tea and eats all the muffins.
  • Big Eater: Algernon
  • Blatant Lies: Jack and Algernon, constantly, and the others get their share as well.
  • Blue Eyes: Gwendolen admires Jack's.
  • Collective Identity: Both Jack and Algernon use the alias Earnest Worthing. Each proposes while using this identity and Hilarity Ensues when Earnest's two fiancees meet each other.
  • Contrived Coincidence: The resolution of the plot hinges on a huge one.
    • The Colin Firth film averts this. Jack just lies. Lady Bracknell knows, but goes along with it. Surprisingly, they didn't have to change the dialog to make it work.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?: The whole play is supposedly full of elaborate puns on male homosexuality (though Wilde's contemporaries and John Gielgud have denied it), most of them are examples of Get Thee to a Nunnery now. Still, the whole 'double life' subtext is effective as ever today.
  • Door Step Baby: Jack
  • Everything Sounds Sexier in French: This is why Lady Bracknell doesn't want French songs played at her next reception.
    • German, on the other hand, sounds "thoroughly respectable" -- and not just to Lady Bracknell. Cecily insists that studying German makes her look plain, and that's probably why Jack insists on her studying German extra hard whenever he's not there to chaperone her.
  • Funny Background Event: In live productions, often when characters are talking with one another, anyone meandering on stage and not directly participating in the conversation are doing something hilarious, such as not-so-subtly listening in.
  • Getting Crap Past the Radar: Allegedly, "Earnest" was a contemporary term, among homosexuals, for "homosexual". Thus, to those in the know, the title of the play becomes "The Importance of Being Homosexual", and the main characters who change their names...
  • Gold Digger: Lady Bracknell, on her own behalf and her nephew's.
  • Gorgeous Period Dress: The 1952 film is full of these.
  • Grande Dame: Lady Bracknell is one of the grandest -- and one of the dame-dest.
  • Have a Gay Old Time
  • Hot for Preacher: Miss Prism.
  • Ice Cream Koan: An awful lot of the wittiest lines sound profound at first, but fall apart when you think about them too hard.
  • I Have No Brother: Cecily thinks Jack is invoking this trope when he really means that his brother has died.
  • Incredibly Lame Pun
  • Implausible Deniability: Jack keeps insisting that the suspicious cigarette case was a gift from his aunt even after it's obvious that Algernon has read the whole inscription.
  • The Ingenue: Gwendolen and Cecily are parodies. Lampshaded by Lady Bracknell for Gwendolen, and Jack for Cecily.
  • Invented Individual: Algernon's Ernest is the nonexistent "Mr Bunbury"; Jack's is, naturally, his brother Ernest.
    • Amusingly, Algy tries to popularize with Jack the word "Bunburyist" to describe people who invent faraway, needy friends as excuses. The fanciful Bunbury, however, inspires minor pity in others and mostly just irritates Lady Bracknell, so he's not the Trope Namer.
  • Ironic Echo: "My first impressions of people are never wrong."
  • The Jailbait Wait: Algernon and Cecily can't marry without Jack's consent until Cecily is thirty-five. Algernon is willing to wait that long, but Cecily isn't.
    • Although that may have been yet another lie on Jack's part. In any case, he's clearly only withholding consent to blackmail Lady Blacknell into letting him marry Gwendolen.
  • Kissing Cousins / Incest Is Relative: At the end of the play, since Jack is Algernon's brother, Jack's girlfriend Gwendolen is his cousin. But that's okay. More worrying might be the relationship between Jack and Algernon - what with the bunburying, and the bickering like an old married couple, and the it being written by Oscar Wilde, and all... look, it doesn't HAVE to be played that way, but the subtext is there if you want it to be.
  • Leave the Two Lovebirds Alone: Algernon volunteers to get Gwendolen's mother out of the way so Jack can propose -- although he does insist that Jack take him out to dinner as payment.
  • Living a Double Life: The entire concept of "Bunburying". Jack is Ernest in town and Jack in the country.
  • Locked Into Strangeness: Played with. The unseen Lady Harbury's hair is said to have "turned quite gold from grief" at her husband's death.

I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger.

I don't play accurately--anyone can play accurately--but I play with wonderful expression.

  • That Makes Me Feel Angry: Cecily at one point announces that she "feel[s] very happy."
  • Thicker Than Water: Inverted. When Jack apologizes for insulting Algernon's aunt, Algernon reassures him that he can't stand his relatives and loves hearing people insult them.
  • Title Drop: The last line.

Lady Bracknell: My nephew, you seem to be displaying distressing signs of triviality.
JackErnest: On the contrary, Aunt Augusta -- I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest.

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