COMEDY

56 COMIC IDENTITYway of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon…not in terms ofbeauty but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization’ (Sontag,1982:106). Published in 1964, ‘Notes on Camp’ anticipates somepostmodernist discussion of the triumph of style, but actually finds itsorigins in much older forms such as Mannerism and eighteenth-centuryliterary excess. ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks’, she writes,it is to ‘understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role’ (Sontag, 1982:109). AsGwendolyn says, ‘in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, isthe vital thing’ (Wilde, 1980:2.28–29). Wilde’s own aesthetic beliefsheld that art was essentially useless, but that its lack of utility was thesource of its beauty. That art existed only for its own sake made itindependent of the world and therefore liberated from it, a liberation thatleft art free to concentrate on its beauty, and ‘the sheer absoluteness ofits detachment’ (Leggatt, 1998:34).In the twentieth century, Wilde’s sophisticated style continued in thework of Noël Coward. Coward, ‘a man who spent a life-timemerchandising his deluxe persona’ (Lahr, 1984:22) was a prolific writerof prose, drama, and over three hundred published songs, all of whichwere characterized by effortless wit and laissez-faire charm. Like Wilde’saristocrats, Coward’s characters enjoy their own fictionality. Thedivorced and reunited couple of Private Lives (1930), for example,share flippancy as a philosophy of life, and a defence against reality:AMANDA. Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious.ELYOT [seriously]. You musn’t be serious, my dear one; it’s just whatthey want.AMANDA. Who’s they?ELYOT. All the futile moralists who try to make lifeunbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh ateverything, all their sacred shibboleths. Flippancybrings out the acid in their damned sweetness andlight.AMANDA. If I laugh at everything, I must laugh at us too.ELYOT. Certainly you must. We’re figures of fun all right.(Coward, 1999:226–227)In Wilde and Coward, then, comic identity is conceived as a means ofrefusing incorporation into a communal identity defined by the sobrietyof the establishment. In both cases there is a celebration of individualismover the masses, an elitist appreciation of privilege over all that is dull