Shaw really did make this joke, but he made it about a dancer, not a play, and he did not word it this way. In his music column in The World of 19 October 1892, defending a Spanish dancer the Empire's audience had received coldly, he wrote: “You were a perfect success: the audience was a dismal failure.” The polished theatre version quoted above is a later retelling, and the earliest example Quote Investigator can find ↗ appears in 1937 under Oscar Wilde's name.
“The Play Was a Great Success, But the Audience Was a Total Failure” widely credited to George Bernard Shaw. Shaw did originate the joke, but not this wording: in his music column in The World (London) of 19 October 1892, reviewing a Spanish dancer at the Empire, he wrote "You were a perfect success: the audience was a dismal failure." The earliest printed example located by Quote Investigator is Daniel Frohman's Encore (1937), where it is credited to Oscar Wilde. Quotle.info
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⚠ The wording in the credit box above is the reworded theatre version. It has no established author and no established first publication, so we assert no rights status for it — credit it as shown, and don’t present it as public domain. Shaw’s own 1892 sentence, “You were a perfect success: the audience was a dismal failure,” is in the public domain and free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations.
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Provenance
Where the joke actually comes from
Column
The World (London), 19 October 1892
Collected in
Music in London 1890-94, Vol. II (Constable, 1932), p. 169
Subject
A dancer at the Empire — not a play
Popular wording
Earliest example located by Quote Investigator: 1937, credited to Oscar Wilde
One performance at the Empire exhibited the audience to pitiful disadvantage. A certain Senorita C. de Otero, described as a Spanish dancer and singer, danced a dance which has ennobled the adjective “suggestive” for me for ever. … This Otero is really a great artist. But do you suppose the house rose at her? Not a bit of it: they stared vacantly … and finally grumbled out a little disappointed applause. Two men actually hissed — if they will forward me their names and addresses I will publish them with pleasure, lest England should burst in ignorance of its greatest monsters.
Take notice, oh Senorita C. de Otero, Spanish dancer and singer, that I wash my hands of the national crime of failing to appreciate you. You were a perfect success: the audience was a dismal failure. I really cannot conceive a man being such a dull dog as to hold out against that dance.
Cut for length
Transcribed from the 1932 Constable scan at the Internet Archive, page 169; ellipses mark cuts and a few obvious scanning artefacts have been silently corrected. Quote Investigator's independent transcription, taken from Dan H. Laurence's 1981 edition of Shaw's Music, matches word for word from “Take notice” onward.
Quote Investigator ↗ traced the quip and concluded that “the primary credit for this quip should go to George Bernard Shaw and not Oscar Wilde,” adding that the evidence Wilde ever used the jest is weak.
Shaw's actual sentence is verifiable in a page scan: in Music in London 1890-94, Vol. II ↗, page 169, inside the column headed 19 October 1892, he writes of a Spanish dancer at the Empire that “You were a perfect success: the audience was a dismal failure.”
The theatre version enters print in Daniel Frohman's Encore (1937) as a Wilde anecdote, is reprinted by Reader's Digest in March 1940 — forty-seven years after Shaw's column — and thereafter circulates under several names, per QI's chronology ↗.
Neither Wikiquote's Shaw page ↗ nor its Oscar Wilde page carries the line in any section, sourced or misattributed — no editor has managed to pin it to either man.
✓Public domain
The excerpt above is Shaw's own text, first published in The World (London) on 19 October 1892 — comfortably before 1931, so it is in the public domain in the United States. The 1932 Constable volume and Dan H. Laurence's 1981 edition are reprints of that 1892 text; their editorial apparatus, introductions and notes remain under their own copyrights, but Shaw's sentences do not. No rights status is asserted for the famous reworded version about a play: its author is unknown, so there is nothing to attach a status to.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Five owners in a hundred years
This is a genuine joke that lost its author. The reshaped theatre version has been credited, in print, to at least five different people — and the man who actually wrote the line is rarely quoted in his own words.
✕
The anecdoteOscar Wilde Most common credit
The earliest attribution to Wilde that Quote Investigator located is Daniel Frohman's 1937 book Encore, page 167, where no play is named; Peter Hay's Theatrical Anecdotes (1987) later attached it to Lady Windermere's Fan. Both fail on the facts: the play was a hit, and Wilde's actual curtain speech ↗ congratulated the audience rather than insulting it.
~
The wordingGeorge Bernard Shaw The credit on this page
Shaw is the right author of the joke and the wrong author of the sentence. Quote-aggregator pages compound this with a hybrid that welds the theatre framing onto Shaw's real adjective — Goodreads runs “The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure” ↗ under Shaw's name with no source at all, and AZQuotes carries the identical unsourced line.
✕
The quipWilliam ‘Willie’ Collier The vaudeville claim
Bennett Cerf's Try and Stop Me (1944) reported, via Joe Laurie Jr., that Collier “originated” the jibe; a 1948 New York Times column pinned it to Collier on a 1912 fiasco ↗. Both postdate Shaw's printed 1892 use.
✕
The quipAn anonymous Broadway producer, and an anonymous pianist Free-floating
By 1940 the line had detached from any named speaker: a Toledo, Ohio newspaper gave it to an unnamed producer after a Broadway opening, and The Victor Book of Musical Fun (1945) gave it to an unnamed pianist leaving a concert ↗.
✓The joke is Shaw's, from a music column dated 19 October 1892, and it was aimed at a London audience that failed to applaud a dancer. The famous sentence about a play is somebody else's polish — and the earliest printed example Quote Investigator has found ↗ carries Oscar Wilde's name, not Shaw's.
Context
A critic picking a fight with an entire theatre
Shaw made this joke in a temper, not in a green room. He was reviewing a variety bill at the Empire for his weekly column in The World, and a Spanish dancer billed as Senorita C. de Otero had just been met with a vacant stare and, in his phrase, “a little disappointed applause.” Two men in the house hissed. Shaw thought she was “really a great artist,” and turned on the room.
What he produced was not a witticism about a flop — it was a critic publicly resigning from his own audience. That is the joke's real shape, and it explains why the reshaped version travels so much better: a playwright drawling at his club that the play was fine and the crowd was the problem is a cleaner anecdote than a music-hall column defending a dancer nobody now remembers. Somewhere between 1892 and 1937 the story lost the dancer, gained a play, and changed hands.
You were a perfect success: the audience was a dismal failure.
Why the Wilde version is doubly wrong
The retelling usually attaches the line to Oscar Wilde on the opening night of Lady Windermere's Fan in 1892. That is wrong twice over. The play was a hit, not a fiasco — and Wilde did address the audience from the stage that night, saying close to the opposite. Richard Ellmann's biography records him congratulating the house on “the great success of your performance,” and telling them their appreciation had been “most intelligent.”
What actually scandalised the critics was that he delivered it holding a lit cigarette, which Punch promptly satirised. The insult only entered the story decades later, when the anecdote had drifted far enough from the evening for anyone to check.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1856–1950 · Irish playwright, critic & Nobel laureate in Literature (1925)
Shaw spent the years before he was a famous playwright being a famously savage critic — music for The Star under the pen name Corno di Bassetto from 1889, then a weekly column in The World signed “G.B.S.” from May 1890 for more than four years, and theatre for The Saturday Review from 1895. The 1892 line at the heart of this page is pure column-Shaw: a performer defended, a whole roomful of Londoners indicted, and the reviewer positioning himself as the only person present with taste. He went on to write Pygmalion, Man and Superman and Saint Joan, and took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Bernard Shaw, music column of 19 October 1892, The World (London); collected in Music in London 1890-94, vol. 2 (London: Constable, 1932), 169. Quote Investigator cites the same review, titled “Visiting The Halls,” from Dan H. Laurence, ed., Shaw's Music: The Complete Musical Criticism, vol. 2, 1890 to 1893 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981), 714. Earliest attribution of the theatre version to Oscar Wilde located by Quote Investigator: Daniel Frohman, Encore (New York: Lee Furman, 1937), 167.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The Play Was a Great Success, But the Audience Was a Total Failure’?” Last verified 1 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-play-was-a-great-success-but-the-audience-was-a-total/