Humor & Life Quote by W. C. Fields

Even in death, W. C. Fields insists on getting the last heckle in. The epitaph "Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia" works because it treats the gravestone - that most solemn of cultural objects - like a punchline delivery system. The joke isn’t just that he’d prefer life to death. It’s that he frames mortality as a customer-service complaint: if the afterlife is the alternative, he’d settle for Philadelphia.

And Philadelphia is doing heavy lifting here. Fields (born in Philadelphia) spent years cultivating a persona built on sour charm: the misanthrope as entertainer, the lovable curmudgeon whose contempt becomes a kind of intimacy with the audience. Picking his hometown, a city long stereotyped (fair or not) as tough, blunt, and unsentimental, sharpens the gag. He’s not claiming paradise; he’s choosing the flawed, noisy, earthly place over whatever romantic consolations people project onto death. That’s both comic and oddly human.

The subtext is classic Fields: distrust the grand story. Funerary language tries to dignify; Fields undercuts it, refusing to be embalmed into reverence. The line also flatters his audience by assuming they can handle cynicism without losing the warmth underneath. It’s a final performance that says: don’t mythologize me, don’t mythologize death - just admit you’d rather still be here, even if "here" includes Philadelphia.