The line is immaterial.
[some thoughts on laughter]
[originally published August 23, 2024]
Yesterday, the National Theatre1 dropped an online trailer for their forthcoming production of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, which will star, among others, Ncuti Gatwa, the latest incarnation of Doctor Who, as Algernon, and Sharon D Clarke2 as Lady Bracknell.
The trailer—linked herewith, and which, by all means, do please enjoy before reading another word of this essay . . .
While we wait, and just to pass the time, here are photographs of the first two New York City productions of Earnest, from 1895 and 1902 respectively:
The trailer, which by now you have presumably watched, centers on,3 as by now you have presumably noted, the misadventures of a smallish brown leather satchel and concludes, as you couldn’t have helped but observe, with the abruptly truncated first half of a single short line of Wilde’s script. For the perhaps unnecessary record, that line in full is:
LADY BRACKNELL: A hand-bag?
Now, that little line might well be simultaneously the most famous and the most infamous laugh line in the history of the theater.4 And I call it a laugh line rather than a punchline because a punchline5 is “the final phrase or sentence of a joke or story, providing the humor or some other crucial element,” and “A hand-bag?” is not the final phrase or sentence of anything and, moreover, provides neither humor—it’s not particularly, or even at all, funny—nor anything substantively crucial. It’s merely a line of no innate prominence in the middle of a scene.
If you don’t believe me, let’s back it up a bit and lay the groundwork for a running jump. Lady Bracknell, you will note, is in the process of interviewing young Jack Worthing, who intends to marry Lady Bracknell’s daughter, Gwendolen. And . . .
LADY BRACKNELL: Are your parents living?
JACK: I have lost both my parents.
LADY BRACKNELL: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.6 Who was your father? He was evidently a man of some wealth. Was he born in what the Radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy?
JACK: I am afraid I really don’t know. The fact is, Lady Bracknell, I said I had lost my parents. It would be nearer the truth to say that my parents seem to have lost me. . . . I don’t actually know who I am by birth. I was . . . well, I was found.
LADY BRACKNELL: Found!
JACK: The late Mr. Thomas Cardew, an old gentleman of a very charitable and kindly disposition, found me, and gave me the name of Worthing, because he happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket at the time. Worthing is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort.
LADY BRACKNELL: Where did the charitable gentleman who had a first-class ticket for this seaside resort find you?
JACK: [Gravely.] In a hand-bag.
LADY BRACKNELL: A hand-bag?7
JACK: [Very seriously.] Yes, Lady Bracknell. I was in a hand-bag—a somewhat large, black leather hand-bag,8 with handles to it—an ordinary hand-bag in fact.
Hmm. Nope. Not particularly, or even at all, funny. Just a line, as I said, in the middle of a scene.
So what, as they say, gives?
What gives is Dame Edith Evans. And boy does she ever.
I can’t, now that I think about it, recall if I first encountered Dame Edith’s delivery of “A hand-bag?” in the 1952 Anthony Asquith film of The Importance of Being Earnest or by way of imitation—because everyone, it seems, who ever encounters Dame Edith’s delivery of the line spends the rest of their lives periodically re-creating it, and I don’t just mean homosexuals, though I do of course mean homosexuals.
And while I’ve long since earned my merit badge in Dame Edith impersonation,9 you might as well go straight10 to the ur-source herself, et voilà.
But what a curious thing, then, that a perfectly nondescript line should be grabbed up by an enterprising actress and rendered so memorably, so thoroughly, so monumentally, so irrevocably, that it remains its own meta-punchline nearly seventy-five years later and can still wring a laugh even by being merely half evoked.
As I was musing yesterday on this unlikely occurrence, a friend offered up to me an essay by the critic Alastair Macaulay, titled “Edith Evans’s Handbag,” which I suspect you’ll find enchanting—I was absolutely blissed out by the time I finished reading it11—and which gives us some invaluable background.
I quote briefly:
When people imitate [Evans’s] “hand-bag” out of context, it sounds like a marvellous “effect.” But she once assured John Gielgud “I never make effects,” and, if you check any or all of [her] recordings, you hear what she meant. Listen and you find that her entire performance negotiates between chest and head tones, and that grandly interrogative upward-sweeping portamenti (“Found?” “The christenings, sir!”) are a constant feature of her characterisation. So her “hand-bag?” is just an organic part of the way she had determined the phrasing of the whole character.
Macaulay reminds us as well that Dame Edith played Lady Bracknell any number of times, in various media, for two decades, so it’s perhaps not all that peculiar that we so closely associate her with the role, and the role with her. (“I did play other parts, you know,” she once commented.12)
But specifically as to the hand-bag line: “Until Evans first uttered it onstage in 1939,” Macaulay notes, “this was not known as a key moment of the role. Since she last essayed the role, it has been an obstacle course for every Lady Bracknell since.”
For instance, when Brian Bedford brought his stupendous Lady Bracknell to New York in 2011, you could practically feel, the afternoon I attended, the audience revving itself up for The Line.13 To his credit, and ingeniously, Bedford helped himself to a huge laugh immediately beforehand—on, as I recall, “this seaside resort”—and then glided through and past “A hand-bag?” without a care in the world.14
Which was perhaps a wiser solution than the one that had been devised by dear Dame Judi Dench for the 2002 film version of Earnest, in which she opted not to help herself to any laughs at all, huge or otherwise, neither on “this seaside resort” nor “A hand-bag?” nor anywhere else in the interview scene nor, indeed, anywhere else in the entire film. Though, to be fair, neither did anyone else in the entire film help themselves to any laughs, of any size, at any point. It hardly seems worth the bother, I’d suggest, to make a thoroughly unfunny movie of The Importance of Being Earnest, though the barbarously mirthless 2020 film version of Noël Coward’s devastatingly hilarious Blithe Spirit, or at least as much of it as I could endure, suggests that this lunacy might be a trend.15
I can only imagine what audiences later this year and early the next will make of Sharon D Clarke’s delivery of the (presumably entire) line, as I can only—scarcely, in fact—imagine what Clarke herself will make of it in the first place. In the meantime, I’m still chortling over that trailer (I’m sure I’ve watched it a dozen times by now) and its winking celebration of one of the most widely beloved and understood absolute in-jokes imaginable.
The By Now Traditional Fine Print
Thank you for being here, thank you for following, thank you for subscribing. All of this substackery of mine is free and will remain that way. Which means that if you have chosen to contribute to its and my upkeep,16 in larger or smaller ways, you are doing something you don’t have to do, which makes your generosity that much more resonant, and I am profoundly grateful. If you’re not yet part of that contributing crew and there’s a part of you that’s thinking “You know what? I like this guy” and you choose to join the crew, I will be eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.
Benjamin
That is, the National Theatre headquartered in London on the south bank of the Thames that The New York Times, for reasons of its own, persists in referring to as “the National Theater,” which is not its name, and which I apparently never tire of pointing out.
I’m holding to the periodless British style here (i.e., Sharon D Clarke rather than Sharon D. Clarke) as Ms. Clarke has, so far, used that style not only in England, as would be expected, but also on Broadway, as would not be expected. I suppose it also reminds one that British actors seem rarely to have middle initials at all.
Many writers write (before they’re copyedited, that is), “centers around.” Even with my extremely limited understanding of geometry I know that that doesn’t make any sense.
At least of the English-speaking theater of which I’m aware. For all I know there’s a line in Shakuntala that absolutely laid ’em in the aisles in fourth-century India.
Also: I don’t know when I’m ever again going to have the chance to tell this story, so as long as we’re here:
In late November 1993, I attended an early preview of the Broadway run of Perestroika, the second part of Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America, and first encountered this memorable exchange between Hannah Pitt, a staid Mormon mother from Salt Lake City, and Prior Walter, a, well . . .
HANNAH: Would you say you are a typical . . . homosexual?
PRIOR: Me? Oh I’m stereotypical. What, you mean like am I a hairdresser or . . .
HANNAH: Are you a hairdresser?
PRIOR: Well it would be your lucky day if I was
. . . Well, the rest of the line is “because frankly,” but no one in the theater heard “because frankly” because the explosion of laughter that met “Well it would be your lucky day if I was” was, to put it mildly, tumultuous, which is to say, to put it less mildly, deafening. And though I didn’t consult my watch then, I will swear to you now that the laughter went on for fully three minutes, by which I mean—because I’m certain that you’re thinking “Oh, please, it didn’t go on for ‘fully three minutes’; three minutes is an eternity”—that the laughter went on for fully five minutes, but I don’t expect you to believe five, so I’m simply going to go with three. I’ll add that as the laughter was finally dying out, some tickled person in the audience suddenly rechortled and the whole house was inspired to guffaw as one all over again. So add on another minute.
(In a 1999 interview conducted by my pal David Benedict, Tony Kushner insisted that “it would be your lucky day [etc.]” is “not a very funny line” but admitted that it always got the biggest laugh in the play—and that Mel Brooks himself had told Kushner that it’s funny. Which makes it funny.)
Amusingly, the stage direction that follows “if I was because frankly” is:
(Little pause.)
As if.
I’m surprised to note that the construction “punchline” has only recently overtaken “punch line.”
Merriam-Webster doesn’t even yet give the one-word version as an alternate spelling, which means that we all still have a lot of work to do.
Now, that’s funny.
In case you were wondering (I certainly was till I looked it up just now; I’ll spare you the charts and graphs this time), “handbag” has been the dominant construction rather than “hand-bag” or “hand bag” virtually since the term was created, so Oscar’s rather off on his own here.
Have you taken note by now that the hand-bag in the trailer is neither somewhat large nor black? Then you might be a copy editor. Or what used to be called in Hollywood, in a term as dear and charming as it is outmoded, a script girl.
I do a rather piquant, if I say so myself, “Mr. Worthing! Rise, sir, from this semi-recumbent posture.”
Hmmph.
Perhaps one should set up a “Leave an essay, take an essay” dish at one’s local literary emporium.
You absolutely must—must—see The Whisperers, from 1967, as soon as you can. It’s devastating.
In the 1964 National Theatre revival of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever (the National’s first ever production of a play by a living playwright), which happened to star Edith Evans, young Maggie Smith made such a meal of the line “This haddock’s disgusting” that her delivery, to the actress’s professed dismay, became the talk of the town. “The fact that everyone was waiting for the line to be said,” she later noted, “became ludicrous.” Ludicrous or not, I wish I could find a recording of Dame Maggie’s delivery of that line—and, why not, as long as I’m wishing for things I can’t have, of the entire production.
I wouldn’t mind taking a moment to revisit a bit more of the scene.
LADY BRACKNELL: In what locality did this Mr. James, or Thomas, Cardew come across this ordinary hand-bag?
I’ve always been fascinated by that peculiarly backpedaling “Mr. James, or Thomas” of Lady Bracknell’s and have decided that it’s Wilde’s subtle suggestion—besides subtle, it’s one of the few recognizably human moments in the entire hothouse play—that the old dragon’s implacable composure is beginning to crack.
And then:
JACK: In the cloak-room at Victoria Station. It was given to him in mistake for his own.
LADY BRACKNELL: The cloak-room at Victoria Station?
JACK: Yes. The Brighton line.
LADY BRACKNELL: The line is immaterial.
Beyond the seaside resorts, and the hand-bags, and even Lady Bracknell’s later masterwork of solipsistic illogic “Come, dear, we have already missed five, if not six, trains. To miss any more might expose us to comment on the platform,” I do think that “The line is immaterial,” with its levels of self-conscious paradoxical self-commentary that I choose to believe Oscar Wilde was entirely unconscious of, is one of the funniest and finest lines in the play, or in any play.
The house, admittedly, was impressive. It’s called Joldwynds, and it’s in Surrey. And yet Blithe Spirit is not about a house.
And Sallie’s!
London is not far for me and that trailer had me gasping. Benjamin, thank you for planting an idea!
I never realized that "hand-bag" has eight syllables. Thanks, Dame Edith! Thank you, Benjamin! 💙