Life's Pleasures Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields’ genius is that he smuggles a whole worldview into a throwaway gag: the problem isn’t alcohol, it’s accountability. By flipping the familiar moral panic of “driven to drink” into the petty dread of “being driven home,” he turns temperance-era virtue on its head. The line works because it pretends to confess irresponsibility while actually staging a performance of it. Fields isn’t defending alcoholism; he’s defending the comic fantasy of a man whose priorities are so skewed that the true horror is losing control of his own misbehavior.

The joke depends on a very American collision of eras. In Fields’ lifetime, drinking wasn’t just a habit, it was a political and cultural battlefield: Prohibition, its hypocrisies, its speakeasy glamour, its sanctimony. “Driven home” lands as a punchline because it’s the voice of someone who knows the rules exist and is bored by them. The implication is that moral reformers are missing the point: the drinker’s real fear is not the bottle, but the buzzkill of enforced safety and domestic return. Home, in Fields’ persona, is where desire gets audited.

It’s also a sly class-and-modernity joke. Cars and “driving” make this a 20th-century quip about mobility, risk, and the new etiquette of public vice. Fields turns a potentially shameful vice into a badge of mischievous autonomy, then undercuts it with the faintest hint of self-awareness: he’s laughing, but he’s not entirely innocent about what’s at stake.