Humor & Life Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields snaps a hallmark of sentimental domestic bliss clean in half, then uses the splinters to sharpen the joke. “The patter of little feet” is a stock phrase engineered to melt audiences: childhood as pure, comforting soundtrack. He opens by letting that treacle play for a beat - “Ah” and “There’s nothing like” signal the expected warm landing - then yanks the rug with a cruelly efficient pivot: not a child, not love, but “a midget for a butler.” The laugh comes from the violent mismatch between the cozy idiom and the mercenary fantasy that follows.

The intent is less about little people than about puncturing the cultural demand to worship family life. Fields’ comic persona was famously misanthropic, allergic to uplift, suspicious of children, marriage, and any institution that pretended to be wholesome. Turning “little feet” into hired help reframes the household not as a sanctuary but as a workplace, with the speaker as petty tyrant. That’s the subtext: behind the postcard of domesticity sits power, resentment, and the desire to control one’s environment.

Context matters, and it’s ugly. Vaudeville and early Hollywood traded in “midget” gags as casual novelty; audiences were trained to treat certain bodies as punchlines. Fields exploits that norm while also mocking the sanctimony around parenthood. The line’s cynicism still hits, but today the collateral damage is louder: the joke exposes not only his contempt for family sentimentality, but an era’s comfort turning a marginalized person into a prop for superiority.