The Importance of Being Earnest

Wilde wrote this in 1895 and it was being performed at the St. James's Theatre while he was simultaneously being prosecuted for gross indecency. Every joke about the performance of respectability, every line about the gap between public identity and private truth, every moment where a character maintains an elaborate fiction to survive polite society, was written by a man who knew exactly what maintaining an elaborate fiction to survive polite society cost. The play looks like a farce about two men who have invented alter egos to escape their social obligations. It is actually about the violence of a society that demands you perform a self you are not and the specific survival strategy of treating that demand so completely seriously that it collapses into comedy. Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labor for being gay. He died in exile three years after his release. Camp — the sensibility Susan Sontag named and that John Waters perfected — starts here: the refusal to take the serious seriously, the insistence on style as content, the understanding that the only honest response to a society organized around performance is to perform better and more obviously than anyone else. The most formally perfect comedy in the English language and the most punk biography on the comedy shelf after Lenny Bruce.