Life's Pleasures Quote by W. C. Fields

A civilized morning routine gets flipped into a punchline by treating alcohol like orange juice: not a guilty pleasure, not a late-night lapse, but a nutritional requirement. Fields’s line works because it’s grammatically “wrong” in a way that reveals character. You don’t drink “of” breakfast; you drink coffee with breakfast. That single preposition turns the meal into a liquid commodity and the speaker into someone so committed to vice that language itself has to bend to accommodate it.

The intent isn’t to confess alcoholism so much as to perform it, theatrically and with a wink. Fields’s screen persona was the aristocrat of the gutter: pompous diction, elegant cadence, and a soul devoted to petty appetites. The humor lives in that mismatch. “I must” has the ring of moral necessity or medical prescription, the kind of phrasing used for fresh air or a tonic. He steals the rhetoric of self-care and applies it to self-destruction, turning indulgence into obligation. That’s the subtext: the world is absurd, so why not make your weaknesses sound like virtues?

Context matters. In Fields’s era, the public knew the figure of the lovable drunk, especially as Prohibition and its aftermath made drinking both taboo and ubiquitous. Comedy became a safe zone where bad habits could be stylized into charm. The line lands because it’s not a sermon or a cry for help; it’s a tiny act of rebellion delivered with impeccable timing. It invites the audience to laugh at the lie we tell ourselves every day: that our compulsions are just “part of the routine.”