Life's Pleasures Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields lands the punchline by pretending hygiene is a moral argument. The setup borrows the earnest cadence of temperance advice - "I never drink water" sounds like a principled lifestyle choice - then detonates into absurdity: water is supposedly ruined by whatever "disgusting things" fish do. The joke works because it flips the normal hierarchy. In reality, water is the pure baseline and booze is the suspect indulgence; Fields stages a world where the baseline is contaminated and the indulgence becomes the rational alternative.

The subtext is classic Fields: a cultivated misanthropy that treats everyday virtue as naive. He doesn't just prefer alcohol; he needs an excuse that sounds faintly empirical, as if he's conducted aquatic field research. "Fish" is doing a lot of work here. They're innocuous enough to be funny, but also a stand-in for the broader public - other creatures, other people's bodies, the shared grossness of modern life. The line turns communal infrastructure (water) into a slapstick horror, and in doing so, licenses the speaker's refusal to participate in normal social expectations.

Context matters: early 20th-century America was saturated with temperance rhetoric and Prohibition-era moralism. Fields made a career out of puncturing that sanctimony by playing the charmingly untrustworthy drinker who refuses shame. The genius is that he doesn't defend vice; he satirizes the idea that anyone's choices are ever as clean, rational, or pure as the moralists claim.