Page 88 - The Language of Humour

WRITTEN TEXTS—LITERATURE 75
4 If one plays good music people don’t listen, and if one
plays bad music people don’t talk.
5 (Describing a novel) The good ended happily and the bad
unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
6 To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had
handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the
ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the
worst excesses of the French Revolution.
7 In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the
vital thing.
8 The two weak points of our age are its want of principle
and its want of profile.
9 Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t
got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest
instinct about when to die.
10 It is always painful to part from people whom one has
known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old
friends one can endure with equanimity. But even a
momentary separation from anyone to whom one has just
been introduced is almost unbearable.

Commentary

The values of the Victorian world, and perhaps of the twentieth century,
are mocked in witty one-liners. The style Oscar Wilde adopts has a
familiar, authoritative ring to it, so that the twist in meaning takes a
moment to sink in. These often begin with def inite statements: ‘I do not
approve of anything’; ‘It is always painful’. Then they drop into a well-
known saying, or a neatly balanced structure. By slightly shifting the
wording, he jolts our expectations. He takes a cliché (1, 2) and changes
‘dirty’ to ‘clean’; ‘three’ to ‘two’ and vice versa, so that the resulting
saying is a reversal of the accepted view of marriage. The simile of
a ‘delicate exotic fruit’ (3) challenges the accepted view of ignorance as
an undesirable state. The others use a balance of structure with related
semantic items: ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily’. This
suggests a neat and watertight case, until you notice the unexpected
twist—cynically suggesting that in real life the good end unhappily.
Once the notion of ‘grave importance’ is mentioned, ‘style’ seems
incongruous; as does the linking of ‘principle’ with ‘profile’. Example 6