The Importance of Being Earnest is very comical play that satirises the conventions and ideals of 18th century society. The characters were all societal cliché's defined by their status and revealed in their relations throughout the play. The comical conventions, which Oscar Wilde uses in the play, are neat epigrams. Either a character's very short statement that pointedly mocks a certain moral or social attitude or a simple paradox that associates two contradictory statements in one. The ideas expressed in the play are that people should treat any trivial matters in life ve…
