Life's Pleasures Quote by W. C. Fields

A throwaway line that lands like a perfectly timed hiccup: it pretends to offer culinary advice, then swerves into confession. Fields builds the joke on a genteel premise - cooking with wine is a sign of refinement, domestic competence, maybe even European sophistication. Then he punctures it with the real priority: the wine is for him. The punchline isn’t just that he drinks; it’s that he barely bothers to keep up the social fiction that the drinking is incidental.

The subtext is a portrait of Fields’ signature persona: the debonair curmudgeon, allergic to piety, always one step ahead of moral judgment. Alcohol here is less a vice than a weapon against pretension. By joking that the wine “sometimes” makes it into the food, he flips the expected hierarchy: the meal becomes the side dish. It’s anti-domestic comedy, a quiet rebellion against the era’s tidy ideals of self-control and propriety.

Context matters: Fields worked in a culture where public virtue was loudly policed (and, not long before, legally enforced via Prohibition). The line smuggles in a kind of libertine shrug - not a grand political argument, just a sneer at sanctimony. It also relies on misdirection as character shorthand. In one sentence, Fields makes himself both the host and the menace in the kitchen: charming enough to invite you to dinner, honest enough to tell you why the bottle’s already half gone.