William J. Florence as Hon. Bardwell Slote in The Mighty Dollar (image: NPG)
Wilde is famous for his wit, and particularly for his epigrams: polished phrases that reveal some hidden truth about life, and that often turn conventional wisdom on its head.
But he also told jokes or amusing anecdotes. His first lecture in America, titled The English Renaissance, was a dry and dull affair. He soon realised that audiences wanted to be entertained as well as informed. When writing his later American lectures on home decoration he made sure to sprinkle in some humour. And his lecture Personal Impressions of America, written especially for British audiences, reads more like a modern stand-up comedy routine than an exercise in pedagogy.
At the outset of his new one-man show Wilde confessed that, despite having travelled from New York to New Orleans and Saratoga to San Francisco, he knew next to nothing about the States. This was probably true, because in many cities he visited he saw little other than his hotel room. This was fine for working up material about the newfangled and ubiquitous cast-iron stove (‘a necessary nuisance, like a dull relation’), or the American habit of hanging pictures up near the cornice (‘it was not until I saw how bad the pictures were that I realised the advantage of the custom’). But it left him in a difficult position when it came to writing about America, and Americans, in general.
Wilde would later pen a dialogue defending the noble art of lying (‘The Decay of Lying’). A beautiful lie, he thought, was better than a banal truth. So, just as today’s observational comics take a mundane experience and ask themselves ‘how can I make this funny?’, Wilde twisted half-truths into bizarre, almost surreal scenarios.
He learnt that America was the home of the marketeer, and that advertisements were plastered over hoardings and even painted onto mountainsides, so he told his audiences that in San Francisco, ‘on the back of a seal basking on the point of the “Seal Rock”, I saw an advertisement for some famous tooth powder’. Not likely! In Salt Lake City he noticed that the religion of the Mormons had crept into everyday life to such a degree that their great commercial building had been named the ‘Zion Co-operative Hallelujah Stores’. In truth, it was called the ‘Zion’s Co-operative Mercantile Institution’.‘The Latter-Day Saints’, The Boston Herald (Boston, MA), 5 Jan. 1882, 4; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZCMI And, while down a silver mine in the Colorado town of Leadville, he claimed to have read passages from the autobiography of the renaissance Florentine silversmith Benvenuto Cellini to the miners. When they asked him why he had not brought Cellini to Leadville, Wilde replied that the man was dead. ‘Who shot him?’ demanded the miners. This, too, must be flim-flam. There is no contemporary evidence that Wilde spoke of Cellini, and the joke is very similar to one he had cut two years prior from his first play, Vera; or, The Nihilists, in which the dead man is not Cellini but Aristotle.Guy, J. (Ed.) (2021) The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Vol. 11: Plays, Vol. 4: Vera; or The Nihilist and Lady Windermere’s Fan (Vol. 11), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 170.330–9
Another joke about Leadville was, according to his friend Robert Sherard, one of his favourites ‘and he developed it as he repeated it’. He told it at a dinner with the French author Edmond de Goncourt, who thought it amusing but improbable. The story was of a Wild West saloon in which he had seen a sign that read: ‘Please do not shoot the pianist: he is doing his best’.Sherard, R. H. (1906) The Life of Oscar Wilde, London: T. Werner Laurie, 227
This joke, as you may have guessed, was also untrue. But Wilde didn’t make it up: he plagiarised it.
On 22 October 1882 Wilde attended a dinner at the Lambs’ Club, a fraternity of actors established in New York in 1874. One hundred and fifty men were present. Wilde was invited to give a speech and did so ‘at great length’. So too did the comedian Billy Florence, who had just been elected Shepherd (President) of the club.
Apologising meekly for his diffidence in occupying a station filled before him by many clever men, Billy craved the indulgence of his flock, whose attention he entreated to the device of a Colorado variety manager, who had a large sign painted over his piano bearing the legend: “Please don't shoot the pianist. He is doing the best he knows how.” Billy wanted a similar leniency extended to himself; but the Lambs agreed that such a demand was uncalled for and unnecessary.[Harrison Grey Fiske], ‘The Usher’, The New York Mirror (New York, NY), 28 Oct. 1882, 7
Wilde has often, and quite rightly, been found guilty of plagiarism. But he never saw anything wrong with taking what someone else had written, or said, and making it his own. ‘Of course I plagiarise’, he told a friend. ‘It is the privilege of the appreciative man.’Wright, T. (2008) Oscar’s Books, London: Chatto & Windus, 184
What Wilde also did was transform and add to what he had plagiarised. He compared this to seeing a monstrous tulip with four petals in someone else’s garden and wanting to grow a monstrous tulip of his own, but with five petals. There was no excuse for growing a tulip with only three.Wilde, O. (1912) Salomé, London: J. Lane, vii–xxiii, xxiii
So, when in Paris the following spring he was invited to give another post-prandial speech, he told a story about Leadville.
I went to the Casino. There I found the miners and the female friends of the miners, and in one corner a pianist – the typical pianist – sitting at a piano over which was this notice: ‘Please do not shoot at the pianist; he is doing his best.’ I was struck with this recognition of the fact that bad art merits the penalty of death, and I felt that in this remote city, where the aesthetic applications of the revolver were already admitted in the case of music, my apostolic task would be much simplified, as indeed it was.
When reports of Wilde’s speech reached America, the editor of The New York Mirror immediately recognised the source of the tale. ‘Where Billy Florence got it I need not explain,’ wrote Harrison Grey Fiske in his column for the paper, ‘as it has been going the rounds in one form or another since the time of the gold-fever in Colorado. The apostle of the eccentric must go further away than Paris to unload his United States chestnuts if he wishes to disguise the place of their growth.’[Harrison Grey Fiske], ‘The Usher’, The New York Mirror (New York, NY), 31 Mar. 1883, 7
But Wilde was unabashed. A couple of months later he crossed the English channel and repeated the story before an even larger audience when he delivered his lecture on America at Prince’s Hall, Piccadilly. In the most familiar version of the lecture (the text published by Stuart Mason in 1906), he only comments ‘The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous.’ But in the version compiled by Geoff Dibb from various contemporary reports of the lecture, we can see that Wilde had even more to say than he had in Paris:
There, one felt one had come across a wonderful height of musical culture. The slightest false note, the slightest false emphasis even, and the life of an artist is forfeited, I think, quite justly. I think death should be the penalty for bad art, and I told them how much I wished that we had in England a rigorous system, for so many Royal Academicians, and other bad artists, would be swept out of the way. The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous and these statistics were so much beyond the ordinary average that the city used to find a difficulty in getting musicians.Dibb, G. (2013) Oscar Wilde: A Vagabond with a Mission, London: The Oscar Wilde Society, 243
Here Wilde uses one of his most valuable gifts – his imagination – and makes the material his own. So please do not shoot the lecturer: he is doing his best. And his best is very good indeed.