The Importance of Being Earnest

What Hacker News says

1. peterfireflyDec 2022
   You're welcome :)

   Let's throw in The Importance of Being Earnest and HHGTTG (don't watch the movie). Maybe also some Vonnegut books? My favourite is Hocus Pocus.

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2. winchlingNov 2018
   Listening to, watching and otherwise enjoying The Importance of Being Earnest has increased my understanding and love of the English language no end:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V_7SoF1HLQ

   It's one of a very small number of plays from Wilde's era that is still performed despite Victorian London's having plenty of theatres:

   http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/mt/theaters/pva234.htm...

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3. dredmorbiusApr 2025
   “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

   ― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

   150 times is a lot of carelessness.

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4. dash2Mar 2025
   The author seems to conflate "dark" with "adult", so let me take the chance to point out this common mistake. Horror films, Warhammer 40K and 2000 AD comics are all famously dark, but they're for kids or teens. A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Importance of Being Earnest are light but grown-up. It's a weird deformation of the past generation to think that being depressing makes you deep.
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5. cb321Jul 2024
   Some might say this observation/trend/etc. is much older than the 1990s, as perhaps exemplified by Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest in 1895 (where literally all that matters is some one's name being "Earnest"). (Apologies if Shakespeare or the Greek Comedies or other got there first - feel free to cite!)
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6. dbishMay 2024
   I love his way of putting it. Memorizing lines as a kid for plays always felt easy but it’s because of something like what he describes.

   My biggest play to memorize was as one of the leads of The Importance of Being Earnest in high school and a big part of knowing it end to end was how I memorize talks today, just repeating it until you become the part, and feel like you know “your part” not “the lines”. You’re not regurgitating lines, you’re stepping through and reacting based on a set of information to a point where you don’t even feel like you’re trying to react. This also helps a lot with improvising when things go wrong since you’re just following the flow your character would with the stimuli, rather then having to step line by line through. The worst people to act alongside were the rote memorizers who would break that flow to go back to a line that was missed or just freeze.

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