Perhaps the single reason that Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest has endured as one of the greatest and most popular works of literature to emerge from Victorian England is its brilliant wit, which conveys both humor and social satire. This wit is the key to Wilde's own aesthetic style, which simultaneously scoffs at the uselessness of art and trumpets that uselessness as art's greatest value; as an aesthete influenced by such men as Walter Pater, Wilde believed in art for art's own sake, and it was only in being useless that art could exist for no sake other than its own. In this independence, Wilde believed art was free to be beautiful, and the artist free to occupy his role as the maker of beautiful things. With his emphasis on beauty, Wilde spent little time cataloguing the gritty details of industrializing England, as did so many of his contemporaries. The Importance of Being Earnest, like so many of his works, focused on the elite, and while making fun of their absurdities and excesses, it also reveled in their witty banter and rambunctious lives. Wilde was undoubtedly an astute social critic, but it is his irrepressible wit that sets him apart.
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One of the ways Wilde's wit manifests itself is in puns. Running throughout the entire play is the double meaning behind the word earnest, which functions both as a male name and as an adjective describing seriousness. The plays twists and turns around this theme, its characters lying in order to be "Ernest," and then discovering that because of a number of remarkable circumstances they had not in fact been lying at all. In claiming to be Ernest, both Algernon and Jack had, unbeknownst to themselves, been earnest. Yet even as he played with his theme for laughs, Wilde saw earnestness as being a key ideal in Victorian culture. Much of British society struck Wilde as dry, stern, conservative, and so "earnestly" concerned with the maintenance of social norms and the status quo that it had become almost inhuman.
