The Importance of Being Ernest has many good examples of comedy, however one that particularly stuck out to me was this on page 23: "To lose a parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both seems like carelessness." This I would consider to be of high level humor as it is playing on the word "lose" and its meanings. High level humor pertains to these kind of examples, where they have a deeper meaning or wordplay we can only understand by having a good understanding of the language. A lower level comedy example would be on page 11 with, "If Gwendolen accepts me, I am going to kill my brother, indeed I think I'll kill him in any case." This example is not to tricky, but blunt sarcasm and irony which is humorous in its delivery as being serious. Low level comedy I think would refer to humor like this, and physical slap stick. The author does include lots of wordplay which is important to most of the jokes and irony, and is mostly contained to the high level comedy examples.
An example of low level humor that is memorable to me would be from "The Office," where the character Micheal Scott says, "You don't call retarded people retards, that's bad taste. You call your friends retards when they're acting retarded." This is funny because in our society we have social rules on what we should and should not do in order to not offend people, and in this we have to watch ourselves and language closely as our words can have a completely different meaning depending on the situation. This is also similar to examples in Ernest because the author wrote many jokes and wordplay relating to the irony of the high class society and life styles, in how they are supposed to talk, eat, and act around each other.
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