Humor & Life Quote by W. C. Fields

A perfectly trimmed one-liner that drags “family pride” into the gutter of the absurd. Fields sets up a familiar brag - lineage, tradition, sturdy masculinity - then snaps it with five extra words: “and most of the women.” The joke works because it’s not really about beards; it’s about the way people mythologize their bloodlines, and how quickly that myth collapses when you apply even a slight twist of logic.

Fields’ persona is doing a lot of silent labor here. He’s the pompous, put-upon American male who wants to sound substantial, rooted, almost aristocratic in his own small way. The beard becomes shorthand for virility and respectability, a cue that we’re in the territory of inherited toughness. Then the punchline turns the cue inside out. Suddenly the family trait isn’t a badge, it’s a freakish affliction - and the speaker’s confidence reads as cluelessness, the classic Fields move.

There’s also a sly taboo tickle: female facial hair, gender boundaries, the discomfort of bodies that don’t obey social scripts. Fields doesn’t lean on cruelty; he leans on the audience’s own assumptions, letting them do the awkward work. In the early 20th-century vaudeville-to-Hollywood pipeline, when masculinity was a performance and “normal” was a hard sell, this kind of gag is a pressure valve: it punctures the era’s stiff binaries with a single, deadpan misdirection. The line is brief, but it leaves behind a bigger joke about American respectability itself: always one detail away from farce.