Funny by the Numbers: Analyzing Joke Distribution in “The Importance of Being Earnest”
By J.p. LawrenceIntroduction
A man tells a joke: he sets up the context, and then, when the audience is ready, good and ready, he waits a beat, and perhaps another – before delivering the punch line…and cue laughter. This is a well-known formula, one Oscar Wilde had great experience with. After all, in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” he pens hundreds of jokes; in Act 2 of that play alone more than one third of the lines are quips, many of which are still quoted.
But what lies beneath? What is Wilde trying to tell us when he gives one character many jokes and another character none? Underlying this humor must be something more, for hidden in the contents of jokes are the “key to unlock the encased meaning of social groups” (Dwyer 1). Grounded in who tells jokes, and who doesn’t, is the dynamic of hierarchy, as research in workplace humor shows participants of higher rank initiate the majority of jokes in conversation (5). Behind each quip is a barb, to each barb is a target, and to each target is an expression of social status. To find whether this research extends to the characters in “The Importance of Being Earnest”, I analyzed who gets what lines to find the power dynamics of each character, and whom they feel is below them or equal to them, as their functions change throughout the play.
Methodology
As I was reading the play, I noticed that Jack, for the most part, delivered far fewer jokes than Algernon. In fact, it seemed to me that Jack spent most of his lines setting up most of Algernon’s jokes. In order to determine, empirically, if this was true, I set out to catalog and classify every line in Act 2 of “The Importance of Being Earnest.” I chose Act 2 because the scene provided a good mix of introducing characters and setting up the plot, while also including every main character in the book. From these numbers, we can see how Wilde chose to distribute what kind of lines to his characters, and from there, see what roles he assigned to each character.
First, let us pause to define the terms and conditions of my experiment. In order to gather my data, I went line by line through the play, classifying each line into the following categories:
Plot-based.
Analysis
Cecily’s dominance in almost all statistical categories in Act 2 was something I wanted to get to the bottom of. Not only is she introduced first in Act 2, she ends up interacting with every other character, and she ends up with the most lines, with almost twice as many lines as the next highest character, Jack. Cecily’s joke-to-assist, or burn, ratio, towers over the rest of the characters, with Cecily telling almost two jokes for every one she sets up. In addition, 43% of her assists occurred in just two scenes, the scene where she meets Algernon and the scene where she meets Gwendolen. This means that in scenes when she’s in the company of people she already knows, she dominates conversations with a burn ratio of 5.3:1, which is an astonishing number for a character supposedly of the lowest status in the world of the play – she is barely an adult, with several elders over her.
This shows what Wilde wants to do is upturn standard conventions of hierarchy. Status, for Wilde, is not measured by real power or wealth, but by wit. When she is around Miss Prism and Chasuble, two characters with foolish, impotent characterizations, she compiles an impressive 6:1 joke ratio, as she continually converts their lines into jokes at their expense. This ties into Dwyer’s notion that humor has the capacity to cement domination (Dwyer 18), only in a distinctive Oscar Wilde style. Joke distribution in “The Importance of Being Earnest” is not driven solely by social or material domination, but in part by hierarchies of wit. The reason Cecily has such a high burn ratio around Miss Prism and Chasuble, despite their status as members of the community, is because Wilde wants to contrast their lack of wit with Cecily’s.
This is not to say that social power dynamics within the play do not play a role in joke distribution. Indeed, dominance changes from scene to scene, and characters with less dominance tend to not tell as many jokes. For instance, in the 32 lines where Cecily interacts with her uncle Jack, in Act 2, she tells only two jokes. This fits the contours of their relationship, as Jack is very protective and domineering of his ward, who calls him by his title, “Uncle,” and who speaks childishly in his presence: “Cecily. Uncle Jack, you are not going to refuse your own brother’s hand?” (1720). Here, too, we can learn about a relationship through joke distribution; around Jack, Cecily tells no jokes because she is in no position to do so.
The impact of the social environment affects Cecily’s conversations with Algernon as well. With Algernon, Cecily tells the same amount of jokes, but with more assists; she asks more questions, and she puts out cloying remarks just begging for a punch line, a snare Algernon is happy fall into. Their conversation is more give and take; Algernon and Cecily tell jokes and assist each other at roughly the same rate, as Wilde seeks to create the dynamics of a matched pairing. In the case of Cecily’s interactions with Miss Prism, Chasuble, and Jack, joke distribution is unequal, and insight into her function in the play can be gained through the contrast; in the case of Cecily and Algernon, however, Wilde can show how the matching aspect of their relationship by showing the equivalency of their wit.
Furthermore, when Cecily is with Gwendolen, the same process happens. When faced with a character on equal wit, Cecily finds her lines frequently being turned into joke fodder by Gwendolen; in fact, her burn ratio drops from 5.3:1 in scenes without Gwendolen or Algernon to 1.5:1 when she is solely with them – a dropoff of almost four jokes per assist. Of course, she also turns Gwendolen’s lines into jokes, herself, and the power struggle between the two can be seen in how they fight it out with coded lines, with wit and savage jokes, but they argue as equals.
A similar, more dramatic dynamic exists in Algernon’s interactions. When Algernon is speaking with any character other than Cecily, he has an astonishing 3.6:1 ratio, which would make him the second funniest character in the act. When he speaks with Cecily, however, he turns to mush in her presence, deferring to her and making bland statements ripe for punch lines; he goes from almost four jokes per assist to half a joke per assist. This wild swing shows the weakness in his knees when faced with witty Cecily. Normally, as noted above, he dominates conversations, particularly with Jack, over whom he owns an embarrassing 9.5:1 advantage.
This brings us to the problem of Jack, who, as I suspected, is the only character who tells fewer jokes than he sets up in Act 2. In fact, according to the chart above, he scores lower than almost every character in the play. This may be due to Jack’s characterization as the straight man to Algernon’s crazy man, as Algernon’s foil. But it may also point to Jack’s role. Jack is the obstacle Algernon must overcome to marry Cecily, who as noted above, received almost a third of the lines in Act 2. That Jack has almost no jokes indicates Wilde, in Act 2, saw something he liked in the characters of Cecily and Algernon that he didn’t find in the character of Jack.
Conclusion
The answer to why some character get jokes and some others may lie in how Wilde wrote his jokes. As Mackie writes, Wilde carried notebooks filled with epigrams and witty sayings suitable for integration into large works; he would then revise these jokes and put them into his works (Mackie 56). What this means, Mackie argues, is that the epigrams Wilde
“published in ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,’ for instance, could have justas easily have been spoken by Lady Windermere’s Lord Darlington, Cecil Graham, or Mrs.Erlynne; a Woman of No Importance’s Mrs. Cheverly or Lord Gorin; or just about any characterin The Importance of Being Earnest.” (56)
This extractability of jokes, Mackie continues, is what led Shaw to criticize The Importance of Being Earnest’s “reliance on stock mechanical fun.” What this extractability creates is a sense that the characters are not speaking organically within the situation and within themselves, but rather they are instead serving as a mouthpiece for Wilde. If Shaw is right, and all of Wilde’s characters are all stock and mechanical, then the presence or absence of jokes is not a judgment on their personalities – because their personalities are farcical, stock – but rather a judgment on that character’s function and ability to advance some part of Wilde’s vision. In other words, Wilde gives a character jokes because he wants the audience to sympathize with them for his reasons at a particular moment.
As Dwyer points out, a joke has three parties: an initiator, a target and an audience. (Dwyer 7). By making a joke, a character, and by extension Wilde, brings the audience into an alliance against the target. Miss Prism and Chasuble have low burn ratios in Act 2 because Wilde wants Cecily, and by extension the audience, to make fun of them for their prim foolishness. Algernon and Cecily, on the other hand, have high burn ratios because they fit Wilde’s vision of what a lively and witty couple should be, especially compared to Jack and Gwendolen, who get less jokes in comparison.
This concept of the foil is very important; the reason a character’s burn ratio changes from scene to scene is to reflect changing power dynamics, which means the presence or absence of jokes reflects the character’s position when measured against someone else. In other words, Wilde does not necessarily give jokes to certain characters because he feels those characters would naturally say those lines, but because he wants to contrast one character with another. The function of joke distribution is to allot audience sympathy to the characters Wilde with whom wants the audience to identify. The characters with whom Wilde does not want the audience to identify become props, assistants to the joke-tellers, lobbing softballs for Wilde’s big hitters to knock out of the park.
What Cecily and Algernon represent then is a foil against to which the other characters can be compared. Here, Dwyer’s assertion that the higher status members tell most of the jokes is troubled, as Cecily and Algernon are not the highest status characters in the play; if anything the vicar should have the most jokes. Instead, Wilde wants us to identify with Cecily and Algernon, because is in their joking they hold a subversive form of strength: the power of wit as a counterpoint to traditional authority. Cecily and Algernon, despite being in positions of lower status as ward and guest, respectively, show the audience through their wit – often at the expense of nominally higher-status characters like Miss Prism and Jack – who really has the power in their respective relationships.
Of course, Wilde does not uniformly place lower-status individuals in positions of power: Poor Merriman is a plot-point machine in Act 2. As noted above, 100% of his lines advance the story in mundane ways. He gets to tell no jokes, and he does not even get to banter enough with the main characters to set up another’s joke. As far as character-based lines go, he has none that pertain to him. It is almost as if he were invisible. It is in Merriman where we can see the real-life side of the dynamics of power most clearly; the servant arrives only when it is useful for him to arrive, and he disappears when it becomes time for the plot to happen. While Merriman is given more to do in other acts, in Act 2, he is relegated to a prop; Wilde has no use for him.
The fact that each character’s burn ratio changes from scene to scene also indicates that Wilde distributes his jokes on more than simple social statuses. When upturning social conventions, Wilde still requires his characters to have wit, and in the confluence of wit and social power, and in the balance that arises, we can see through comparison the power dynamics of each scene and how they change based on who tells jokes and when. Cecily and Algernon have a higher burn ratio than other characters because they hold the power of intellect and power over those Oscar Wilde wished to paint as staid and foolish.
Of course, the concept of burn ratio is not comprehensive. I have not researched the other two acts of the play, and each category is subjective. However, the jokes in the play can still show the function and status of each character as dictated by Wilde, with the strongest intellects and wittiest tongues getting the best lines, at least until they are in a situation that overrides their wit. Dominance, for Wilde, is not simply who has the most money, but also whoever has the most wit. Humor, in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is a kind of warfare, where the strongest and dominant battle for intellectual superiority, with wit as their ammunition. Knowledge is power, and wit even more so, for as Wilde is reputed to have said, “I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.”
Plot-based.
- These lines are defined by their banality. These are the boring lines never included in quote books, lines whose utility rests in their ability to move the plot forward. “CECILY: This is Uncle Jack. (Wilde 1728)” is an example of such a line. Merriman, the servant, in particular moves the plot forward in 100% of his lines in Act 2, with such gems as, “Mr. Ernest Worthing has just driven over from the station (1715),” and “The dogcart is waiting, sir. (1722).” This points to a key element of plot-based lines: their transferability. Any character could say them without seeming out of character; a good rule of thumb is that if one could replace the character originally saying the line with Merriman and still keep the spirit of the line, then the line is probably plot-based. As plot-based lines are the bread and butter of a narrative, it is not surprising they comprised the largest grouping, occurring almost 200 times.
- These lines do not necessarily move the plot forward, but instead add details to the disposition of each character. For instance, many scenes in Act 2 focus on developing the stern, foolish nature of Miss Prism, and lines such as “That depends on the intellectual sympathies of the woman. Maturity can always be depended on. Ripeness can be trusted. Young women are green (1718),” have as their purpose building the idea of Miss Prism as an older but proud woman, secure in her righteousness, insecure in her years. While most of these lines are self-descriptive, some character-based lines are directed toward another, as a way of showing, through indirect means, what others think of a certain character. Character-based lines often overlap with jokes, and in all, I counted 124 instances of character-based lines.
- Oscar Wilde was known for his jokes, and “The Importance of Being Earnest” does not disappoint. As I went through Scene 2, I more than 150 instances of what I recognized as jokes. While the definition of what is and what is not a joke is subject to interpretation, I tried to include every instance I could find, whether that entails a quip, a jab, a rant, a ridiculous description, or an instance of situational irony. More than anything, however, I operated under the precepts of “I know it when I see it.”
- Some lines in “The Importance of Being Earnest” are empty of importance to either the plot or to the development of character. These lines can be recognized by the joke that follows them, or the expectation created in the reader of an upcoming joke. Throughout the act, I counted 90 of these assists. Notice the set-up, the definite pause, the unstated beat, in these two examples: “You have been christened already,” Jack objects, followed by Algernon’s “Yes, but I haven’t for years,” (1730), and “Your rector here is, I suppose, thoroughly experienced in the practice of all the rites and ceremonials of the Church,” Algernon says, followed by Cecily’s “Oh yes. Dr. Chasuble is a most learned man. He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows.” (1724). Notice how the first joke would not be able to stand on its own if taken out of context: “Yes, but I haven’t for years.” There is a symbiotic relationship between the assist and the joke, although the second joke, the one about Chasuble, shows how sometimes the assist is used as a way to fit the joke into the plot in a logical way. Although the second joke could stand alone, the assist gives the joking character a motive to tell his joke; the assist gives it a reason for being in the play.
Analysis
Cecily’s dominance in almost all statistical categories in Act 2 was something I wanted to get to the bottom of. Not only is she introduced first in Act 2, she ends up interacting with every other character, and she ends up with the most lines, with almost twice as many lines as the next highest character, Jack. Cecily’s joke-to-assist, or burn, ratio, towers over the rest of the characters, with Cecily telling almost two jokes for every one she sets up. In addition, 43% of her assists occurred in just two scenes, the scene where she meets Algernon and the scene where she meets Gwendolen. This means that in scenes when she’s in the company of people she already knows, she dominates conversations with a burn ratio of 5.3:1, which is an astonishing number for a character supposedly of the lowest status in the world of the play – she is barely an adult, with several elders over her.
This shows what Wilde wants to do is upturn standard conventions of hierarchy. Status, for Wilde, is not measured by real power or wealth, but by wit. When she is around Miss Prism and Chasuble, two characters with foolish, impotent characterizations, she compiles an impressive 6:1 joke ratio, as she continually converts their lines into jokes at their expense. This ties into Dwyer’s notion that humor has the capacity to cement domination (Dwyer 18), only in a distinctive Oscar Wilde style. Joke distribution in “The Importance of Being Earnest” is not driven solely by social or material domination, but in part by hierarchies of wit. The reason Cecily has such a high burn ratio around Miss Prism and Chasuble, despite their status as members of the community, is because Wilde wants to contrast their lack of wit with Cecily’s.
This is not to say that social power dynamics within the play do not play a role in joke distribution. Indeed, dominance changes from scene to scene, and characters with less dominance tend to not tell as many jokes. For instance, in the 32 lines where Cecily interacts with her uncle Jack, in Act 2, she tells only two jokes. This fits the contours of their relationship, as Jack is very protective and domineering of his ward, who calls him by his title, “Uncle,” and who speaks childishly in his presence: “Cecily. Uncle Jack, you are not going to refuse your own brother’s hand?” (1720). Here, too, we can learn about a relationship through joke distribution; around Jack, Cecily tells no jokes because she is in no position to do so.
The impact of the social environment affects Cecily’s conversations with Algernon as well. With Algernon, Cecily tells the same amount of jokes, but with more assists; she asks more questions, and she puts out cloying remarks just begging for a punch line, a snare Algernon is happy fall into. Their conversation is more give and take; Algernon and Cecily tell jokes and assist each other at roughly the same rate, as Wilde seeks to create the dynamics of a matched pairing. In the case of Cecily’s interactions with Miss Prism, Chasuble, and Jack, joke distribution is unequal, and insight into her function in the play can be gained through the contrast; in the case of Cecily and Algernon, however, Wilde can show how the matching aspect of their relationship by showing the equivalency of their wit.
Furthermore, when Cecily is with Gwendolen, the same process happens. When faced with a character on equal wit, Cecily finds her lines frequently being turned into joke fodder by Gwendolen; in fact, her burn ratio drops from 5.3:1 in scenes without Gwendolen or Algernon to 1.5:1 when she is solely with them – a dropoff of almost four jokes per assist. Of course, she also turns Gwendolen’s lines into jokes, herself, and the power struggle between the two can be seen in how they fight it out with coded lines, with wit and savage jokes, but they argue as equals.
A similar, more dramatic dynamic exists in Algernon’s interactions. When Algernon is speaking with any character other than Cecily, he has an astonishing 3.6:1 ratio, which would make him the second funniest character in the act. When he speaks with Cecily, however, he turns to mush in her presence, deferring to her and making bland statements ripe for punch lines; he goes from almost four jokes per assist to half a joke per assist. This wild swing shows the weakness in his knees when faced with witty Cecily. Normally, as noted above, he dominates conversations, particularly with Jack, over whom he owns an embarrassing 9.5:1 advantage.
This brings us to the problem of Jack, who, as I suspected, is the only character who tells fewer jokes than he sets up in Act 2. In fact, according to the chart above, he scores lower than almost every character in the play. This may be due to Jack’s characterization as the straight man to Algernon’s crazy man, as Algernon’s foil. But it may also point to Jack’s role. Jack is the obstacle Algernon must overcome to marry Cecily, who as noted above, received almost a third of the lines in Act 2. That Jack has almost no jokes indicates Wilde, in Act 2, saw something he liked in the characters of Cecily and Algernon that he didn’t find in the character of Jack.
Conclusion
The answer to why some character get jokes and some others may lie in how Wilde wrote his jokes. As Mackie writes, Wilde carried notebooks filled with epigrams and witty sayings suitable for integration into large works; he would then revise these jokes and put them into his works (Mackie 56). What this means, Mackie argues, is that the epigrams Wilde
“published in ‘Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,’ for instance, could have justas easily have been spoken by Lady Windermere’s Lord Darlington, Cecil Graham, or Mrs.Erlynne; a Woman of No Importance’s Mrs. Cheverly or Lord Gorin; or just about any characterin The Importance of Being Earnest.” (56)
This extractability of jokes, Mackie continues, is what led Shaw to criticize The Importance of Being Earnest’s “reliance on stock mechanical fun.” What this extractability creates is a sense that the characters are not speaking organically within the situation and within themselves, but rather they are instead serving as a mouthpiece for Wilde. If Shaw is right, and all of Wilde’s characters are all stock and mechanical, then the presence or absence of jokes is not a judgment on their personalities – because their personalities are farcical, stock – but rather a judgment on that character’s function and ability to advance some part of Wilde’s vision. In other words, Wilde gives a character jokes because he wants the audience to sympathize with them for his reasons at a particular moment.
As Dwyer points out, a joke has three parties: an initiator, a target and an audience. (Dwyer 7). By making a joke, a character, and by extension Wilde, brings the audience into an alliance against the target. Miss Prism and Chasuble have low burn ratios in Act 2 because Wilde wants Cecily, and by extension the audience, to make fun of them for their prim foolishness. Algernon and Cecily, on the other hand, have high burn ratios because they fit Wilde’s vision of what a lively and witty couple should be, especially compared to Jack and Gwendolen, who get less jokes in comparison.
This concept of the foil is very important; the reason a character’s burn ratio changes from scene to scene is to reflect changing power dynamics, which means the presence or absence of jokes reflects the character’s position when measured against someone else. In other words, Wilde does not necessarily give jokes to certain characters because he feels those characters would naturally say those lines, but because he wants to contrast one character with another. The function of joke distribution is to allot audience sympathy to the characters Wilde with whom wants the audience to identify. The characters with whom Wilde does not want the audience to identify become props, assistants to the joke-tellers, lobbing softballs for Wilde’s big hitters to knock out of the park.
What Cecily and Algernon represent then is a foil against to which the other characters can be compared. Here, Dwyer’s assertion that the higher status members tell most of the jokes is troubled, as Cecily and Algernon are not the highest status characters in the play; if anything the vicar should have the most jokes. Instead, Wilde wants us to identify with Cecily and Algernon, because is in their joking they hold a subversive form of strength: the power of wit as a counterpoint to traditional authority. Cecily and Algernon, despite being in positions of lower status as ward and guest, respectively, show the audience through their wit – often at the expense of nominally higher-status characters like Miss Prism and Jack – who really has the power in their respective relationships.
Of course, Wilde does not uniformly place lower-status individuals in positions of power: Poor Merriman is a plot-point machine in Act 2. As noted above, 100% of his lines advance the story in mundane ways. He gets to tell no jokes, and he does not even get to banter enough with the main characters to set up another’s joke. As far as character-based lines go, he has none that pertain to him. It is almost as if he were invisible. It is in Merriman where we can see the real-life side of the dynamics of power most clearly; the servant arrives only when it is useful for him to arrive, and he disappears when it becomes time for the plot to happen. While Merriman is given more to do in other acts, in Act 2, he is relegated to a prop; Wilde has no use for him.
The fact that each character’s burn ratio changes from scene to scene also indicates that Wilde distributes his jokes on more than simple social statuses. When upturning social conventions, Wilde still requires his characters to have wit, and in the confluence of wit and social power, and in the balance that arises, we can see through comparison the power dynamics of each scene and how they change based on who tells jokes and when. Cecily and Algernon have a higher burn ratio than other characters because they hold the power of intellect and power over those Oscar Wilde wished to paint as staid and foolish.
Of course, the concept of burn ratio is not comprehensive. I have not researched the other two acts of the play, and each category is subjective. However, the jokes in the play can still show the function and status of each character as dictated by Wilde, with the strongest intellects and wittiest tongues getting the best lines, at least until they are in a situation that overrides their wit. Dominance, for Wilde, is not simply who has the most money, but also whoever has the most wit. Humor, in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” is a kind of warfare, where the strongest and dominant battle for intellectual superiority, with wit as their ammunition. Knowledge is power, and wit even more so, for as Wilde is reputed to have said, “I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.”