"Abstaining is favorable both to the head and the pocket"
About this Quote
Fields weaponizes thrift as a punchline, dressing up self-indulgence in the stiff collar of common sense. "Abstaining" arrives like a sermon word, the kind a temperance crusader might deploy with a straight face. Then he lands the joke in the clinching phrase: its benefits are "to the head and the pocket". It’s mock-moral accounting, a little ledger-book wisdom that pretends to be wholesome while quietly winking at everything Fields is famous for: appetites, vices, and the art of talking your way around virtue.
The specific intent is double. On the surface, it’s practical advice: don’t overdo it, you’ll feel better and spend less. Underneath, it’s Fields-style cynicism about how morality gets sold. He doesn’t praise abstention because it’s right; he praises it because it’s efficient. That swap - ethics converted into cost-benefit analysis - is the comedic engine. It exposes how often "good behavior" is justified not by principle but by self-interest: avoid the hangover, avoid the bill, call it character.
Context matters: Fields came up in an America where temperance rhetoric and middle-class respectability were loud, sanctimonious forces, and where comedy thrived on puncturing them. His persona was the perpetually beleaguered schemer, suspicious of uplift and allergic to sincerity. By linking the "head" (hangovers, regret, reputation) and the "pocket" (cash, consequence), he makes restraint sound less like piety and more like damage control - a survival strategy for the modern sinner.
The specific intent is double. On the surface, it’s practical advice: don’t overdo it, you’ll feel better and spend less. Underneath, it’s Fields-style cynicism about how morality gets sold. He doesn’t praise abstention because it’s right; he praises it because it’s efficient. That swap - ethics converted into cost-benefit analysis - is the comedic engine. It exposes how often "good behavior" is justified not by principle but by self-interest: avoid the hangover, avoid the bill, call it character.
Context matters: Fields came up in an America where temperance rhetoric and middle-class respectability were loud, sanctimonious forces, and where comedy thrived on puncturing them. His persona was the perpetually beleaguered schemer, suspicious of uplift and allergic to sincerity. By linking the "head" (hangovers, regret, reputation) and the "pocket" (cash, consequence), he makes restraint sound less like piety and more like damage control - a survival strategy for the modern sinner.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Discipline |
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