Probably The Importance of Being Earnest. For some reason no matter
how many times you see/read it the lines are as funny the eightieth
time as the first. That's the mark of high comedy.
One of the great moments in theatre: "Prism: where is that baby?"
Though I've sometimes thought that the Oedipus Rex is almost the
funniest play ever written. This may seem like a bizarre claim, but
think about it: the situation of a man progressively attempting to
make his situation better, but out of ignorance instead progressively
making it worse, is one of the archetypal comic routines. The
disjunction between what the protagonist thinks is happening and what
we the audience know is really happening is the salient element of
both tragedy and comedy, and nowhere are the two more perfectly fused
than in the Oedipus Rex: it's the most tragic of plays instead of the
most comic only because the balance is skewed to a minuscule extent
towards the tragic.
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Jon Corelis www.geocities.com/jgcorelis/
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