Wilde's 'trivial comedy for serious people' skewers Victorian earnestness through two bachelors who invent fictitious identities to escape social obligation. Its flawless epigrams and farcical double lives make it the sharpest stage satire of manners in the English language.
Sources for Oscar Wilde — The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde — The Importance of Being Earnest in Satire
Held in the Satire chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- Anonymous (Egypt) — The Satire of the Trades (The Instruction of Kheti) (c. 1900 BCE)
- Aristophanes — The Birds (c. 414 BCE)
- Aristophanes — The Clouds (c. 423 BCE)
- Lucian of Samosata — A True History (Verae Historiae) (c. 175 CE)
- Horace — Satires, Epistles, and the Art of Poetry (c. 35 BCE)
- François Rabelais — Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532)
- Desiderius Erasmus — The Praise of Folly (1511)
- Thomas More — Utopia (1516)
- Jonathan Swift — Gulliver's Travels (1726)
- Voltaire — Candide, or Optimism (1759)
- Mark Twain — A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
- Ambrose Bierce — The Devil's Dictionary (1911)