When Reality Mimics Satire, You Are The Joke

the importance of being earnest

“Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.” - The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde

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Image: Melania Trump at the 47th Presidential Inauguration Parade.

When Melania Trump descended upon the inauguration parade in a Beyoncé-Formation-tour-meets-Carmen-Sandiego-meets-Michael-Jackson-Smooth-Criminal hat, I didn’t know whether to take the fashion decision in earnest. Very quickly, I began to hear opinions that the outfit was her trolling her husband and the American voters who elected him, that – even though you could not see her eyes – she was winking with his detractors in solidarity. Simultaneously, I heard pleas from group chats that the outfit was a serve and a serious fashion choice for a First Lady set on bringing glamour back into the White House with a roster of designers who were no longer afraid to dress her. Finally, I heard that the outfit was a distraction from the Trump administration's swift plans of mass deportations and anti-diversity rollbacks.

The outfit could have indeed been all of the above; a dark work of satire that reveals something true yet trivial about Melania. But who can be sure? After all, this woman told us, in one way or another, that she really doesn’t care. So why should we?

But, at the time, I wasn’t really paying attention to the inauguration. I wasn’t even in America. While Carrie Underwood struggled to find the note at Trump’s inauguration, I found myself in London for work, landing at Heathrow Airport on MLK Day. To beat ‘the January Blues,’ I extended my trip and stayed the week.

The trip was planned in haste but, bit by bit, things began to fall into place. I was extended an invitation to see The Importance of Being Earnest at the National Theatre, a bodaciously charming reproduction of Oscar Wilde’s final play, and accepted without any knowledge of the comedy. I was a fan of Wilde’s gothic-horror novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, but hadn’t read anything else from the Irish gaylord’s oeuvre.

While The Importance of Being Earnest, led by Ncuti Gatwa (Sex Education, Barbie), appears to be about two friends who fabricate and cosplay as a man named "Ernest" to win the hearts of their respective love interests, this is merely the starting point. Oscar Wilde's masterpiece is a biting satire of Victorian society. The characters, far from earnest, are superficial, dishonest, and ultimately absurd – perfect players in a comedy of manners.

The comedy’s characters quibble extensively over what is deemed worthy of pretension and intense thought. Frivolous subjects like cucumber sandwiches and fashion choices are debated at length while more serious subjects are glossed over, adding to the farcical effect. The play is packed with play-on-words and subtleties and – one hundred and twenty years later – still feels fresh:

JACK:
My dear fellow, the truth isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman!

ALGERNON:
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to some one else, if she is plain.

I learned that the play is of a comedic subgenre called ‘high farce,’ which is defined as a comedy that relies on improbable and exaggerated situations, clever wordplay, and satire. Oscar Wilde described the play as “exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy: that we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”

But, in 2025, the embellished sensibilities of Wilde’s upper class somehow felt more realistic than ever. Today, the axis that separates irony from sincerity has become an even shorter walk. So much so that reality often mimics and even supersedes what you would see in a work of satire – be it a television show or a play.

Tucked beneath my hotel’s bedsheets in London, I scrolled through clips from the Trump inauguration. A circus of celebrities and billionaires seized the spotlight, keen to make a good impression, while elected cabinet officials withered in the back row. The whole spectacle felt like something out of Succession¹, perhaps our most contemporary example of high farce comedy. Reality-mimics-satire. When this is juxtaposed with the dialogue and humour of the internet, where shitposts reign supreme and nuance is lost, the difference becomes harder to parse. Not only because we have an increased difficulty with being able to discern what is real and what is fake with the advent of AI but because an effective shitpost typically reveals something true about the world we live in. For that reason, I typically am pro-shitpost. Take

jaboukie young-white

’s legendary ‘FBI’ MLK tweet that is closer to fact than fiction²:

Source: Jaboukie’s old Twitter page lol.

Could something be so extravagantly satirical that it points towards a purer truth? Can something be so mechanically earnest that it is patently false? I constructed a chart with contemporary examples to help solve:

did i get it right? sound off in the comments.

I mentioned the Jaboukie tweet as an example of high farce that points towards the truth. (His Mitch McConnell fan fiction is another example worth reading). Maybe the inverse of modern-day high farce is something like Netflix’s reproduction of Queer Eye, an artifact that tries so desperately to be earnest but has, in recent seasons and amidst cast drama, felt completely fraudulent.

When I think about our current circumstances, Melania’s hat, and beyond, I can’t tell if I’m supposed to laugh. When Melania steps out, in a hat or a pussy bow or a cryptic jacket, I don’t know if I should be taking her decisions seriously or not. I guess I don’t know the First Lady well enough to know where to place the joke. But perhaps, that just means the joke is on me.

brendeezyy

A post shared by @brendeezyy

Over the weekend, whenever a Brit heard I was visiting from New York, they gave me a sly smile or made a light joke at the idea of me escaping the United States. Maybe it was just British humour, offering dry condolences and sarcasm in the face of something direr. In these situations, I felt pained to participate, awkwardly laughing along at my own expense.

But, when I landed back in JFK and joined the customs line for citizens and permanent residents, no one was laughing. The curtains had been called and the show was over. Eggs were still $9.99. The snowstorm that plagued the city while I was away had thawed. This was just our life now, the dead end of a bad joke, and, over the next few days, I caught the flu.

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Thank you for reading. Later this week, I will be reading at the Brooklyn stop of

Ira Madison III

’s Pure Innocent Fun book tour. I hope to see some of you there 🤠

PURE INNOCENT FUN is a memoir told through sixteen essays, combining pop culture criticism and a coming-of-age story. You can purchase it here or at your local bookstore.

And finally, related essays from the LOOSEY archive…

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1. In a special scene in Succession, Tom Wambsgans critiques Greg Hirsh’s date’s ‘ludicrously capacious’ handbag. “What’s even in there, huh?” Tom asks of the bag. “Flat shoes for the subway? Her lunch pail?” So much class dissection under the guise of comedy is wrapped in this exchange that it feel in direct lineage to Wilde’s work. Thus, it wasn’t much of a surprise to me when in The Importance of Being Earnest a significant handbag is also described as ‘capacious,’ signalling to me that the writers of Succession have been referencing and paying homage to Wilde all along. An inside joke.

2. A key element of ‘high farce’ is mistaken identities. This is a clear plot driver for The Importance of Being Earnest as Jack and Algernon pretend to be a man named ‘Ernest’ but also rings true in Jaboukie’s tweet. The Oscar Wilde of our generation? Perhaps.