Life's Pleasures Quote by W. C. Fields

W. C. Fields turns the language of temperance on its head, and that inversion is the whole joke. Water, the emblem of clean living, gets treated like a dangerous vice: "habit-forming". The line works because it borrows the moral panic usually reserved for alcohol or narcotics and applies it to the most innocent substance imaginable. It is mock prudence as a cover for unapologetic indulgence, a signature Fields posture: the man who sounds principled only because he has weaponized principle into an excuse.

The specific intent is to make abstention itself look ridiculous. Fields isn't just saying he prefers booze; he's performing a kind of cranky anti-virtue, where self-control is framed as a slippery slope. Subtextually, the joke flatters the audience's awareness that "habit-forming" is a scare-word, one of those public-health phrases that pretends to be scientific while smuggling in judgment. Fields uses it like a stage prop, letting the phrasing do the heavy lifting. The deadpan delivery implied by the sentence structure - short, declarative, then a faux-reason - mimics respectable logic while advertising its absurdity.

Context matters: Fields' persona emerged in early 20th-century American entertainment, shadowed by Prohibition and the broader culture war over drinking. His comedy often treated authority, hygiene, and respectability as con games. This line is a miniature manifesto from that worldview: if society is going to moralize your pleasures, he'll moralize your necessities, and laugh while doing it.