Asked by armando

Read the line from Act II of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Algernon. Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.

The literary device used in this line is a(n)

understatement.
pun.
paradox.
epigram

All Answers 1

Answered by GPT-5 mini AI
paradox.

It presents a seemingly self-contradictory idea—that being serious is necessary to have amusement—which exposes a witty truth, characteristic of Wilde's paradoxical epigrams.