Fatherhood Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields lands the laugh by wearing the costume of authority and then yanking it off in the same breath. “I am an expert of electricity” is pure, pompous self-certification: the kind of phrase a charlatan, a blowhard, or a salesman would deliver with a straight face. Then comes the pivot, and it’s lethal. His “expertise” is inherited not from a university lab but from a state prison, where “applied electricity” reads less like a respectable discipline and more like an institutional euphemism for electrocution. The joke isn’t just that he’s lying; it’s that the language of professionalism is flexible enough to conceal violence in plain sight.

Fields’ persona thrived on this kind of verbal trapdoor: he plays a man who wants status but can only access it through crooked proximity. The father “occupied the chair” is a brilliant parody of academic prestige, a genteel phrase stapled onto a place designed for punishment. That collision does two things at once: it punctures the pretensions of credential culture and it invites the audience to enjoy their own complicity in euphemism. We get the joke because we know what’s being politely not said.

Context matters: in an era when electricity symbolized modern progress - lighting, radios, industry - Fields flips the symbolism. Progress has a shadow; the same force that powers a city can also power a killing machine. He turns modernity’s brag into a one-liner about how easily institutions sanitize what they do, and how eagerly people borrow that sanitized language to sound important.