There Are No New Ideas
An unsettling realization
I had strange experience recently. I was watching a video of a performance of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. And it felt like a sitcom. As a play written in 1895, I was expecting a boring plot, opaque language, and general overformality. I did not find what I expected. While the language remained harder to parse than modern works, I was shocked by how much I felt like I was watching an episode of Friends. The laugh of the audience was just like a laugh track, and the jokes were as witty as something out of The Office. Take this one:
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” (Wilde)
Or this:
“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.” (Wilde)
These jokes make me laugh out loud every time I read them. Upon hearing them for the first time, I felt like I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone. “Wait…” I thought, “old writing can be funny?”
Culture changes, language changes, societal ideals change, politics change, geography changes, and empires rise and fall. What never changes is the fact that we are human. What I began to discover, upon watching that play, was just how much about life and literature can…
