ABSTRACT
Studies of humor neglect Salome, Oscar Wilde's dramatization of the biblical story of John the Baptist's decapitation. Wilde dwells in both crowns as writer and lover of men, a Victorian queen living at the transgressive rim. Wilde's play walks a dark edge of humor verdant with double entendre. Just as German culture influenced Wilde's naming of sexual practices, French culture provided the young Wilde with a range of fashionable and subversive gestures, including the green carnation which became his trademark "buttonhole. Disguising one's true passions is a recurrent theme in Wilde's oeuvre, elegantly hidden in fashions, predilections and polite servings at appropriate times. Although necessarily identifying Jews as religious individuals whose speech resembles that of animals, Wilde's anti-Semitic depiction of Jews generally attacks Jewish philosophy rather than physiognomy. The first mention of Jews, moreover, contains a translator's pun, presumably Wilde's lover deploying the playwright's own surname: the howling beasts are "wild."
