Abbot is to Costello as Oscar Wilde is to Jesus Christ.

Thursday, cigarette #1

"What's the matter, sister? You ain't saying much."
"Seems to me you're doing excellently without any assistance."
"Well, shut my big mouth! You know, there's nothing I like better than to meet a high-class mama that can snap 'em back at ya. 'Cause the colder they are, the hotter they get. That's what I always say..."

"Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman."

"What?"

"It's Oscar Wilde."

"That's fine, but it's experientially untrue..."

Lines were drawn, positions attacked, screwball comedies cited, and James Agee invoked, all over the question "Does every relationship need a straight man, or is a comedian-comedienne dynamic actually sustainable?" Verdict: it depends.

If you take 30's and 40's screwball comedies as your model for romantic interaction (and why wouldn't you?), it seems at first like witty repartee is the very language of love. But think of His Girl Friday or It Happened One Night: is Rosalind Russell funnier when she wants to banter with Cary Grant, or when she doesn't? Did they cast Claudette Colbert for her smile, or her pout? The audience's favorite character in A Woman of No Importance is Mrs. Allonby, but the male characters are all more interested in Puritan Hester Worsley.

It's possible for a couple to be made up of two comedians when the rest of the world is their straight man (can't think of a good example off the top of my head), but the ways in which this is unsustainable should be obvious.

The context of the Wilde quote brings it all back to theology (as per usual):

LORD ILLINGWORTH: Women have become too brilliant. Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman.

MRS. ALLONBY: Or the want of it in a man.

LORD ILLINGWORTH: You are quite right. In a Temple everyone should be serious, except the thing that is worshipped.

MRS. ALLONBY: And that should be man?

LORD ILLINGWORTH: Women kneel so gracefully; men don't.

Everyone in the Temple should be serious exept whoever's being worshipped! God can be funny in ways that we can't! In the same way that Wilde discovered that transforming brute suffering into noble tragedy was Christ's job and not his,* he found that Christ is the universal comedian, not him; we are all His straight men. (Whether Wilde thinks we worship Christ because he's the universal comedian or he's the universal comedian because we worship him doesn't really matter.) Every man has his own Reading Gaol, and you try cracking a joke from cell C.3.3.

* "To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it was not so. With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its eternal mouthpiece." De Profundis