Witty One-Liners Quote by Will M. Cook

Delirium turns the body into an unreliable narrator, and Cook milks that unreliability for a punchline that’s sneakier than it looks. The surface gag is simple: a man is so out of it he mistakes water for wine and gets “gloriously drunk” anyway. But the mechanics of the sentence are the real trick. It’s built like a bar story, paced with quick escalations (“drank... thought... got...”) that mimic the tilt of intoxication. The word “glorious” seals it: not merely impaired, but triumphantly so, as if the mind’s error is a kind of victory.

The subtext is about how intoxication isn’t only chemistry; it’s suggestion, desire, permission. Cook is pointing at the placebo effect before it was a TED Talk staple: belief can be a drug, and sometimes the craving to escape is strong enough to manufacture its own escape. Water becomes wine because the speaker wants it to. Or because his delirium (illness, exhaustion, fever, grief) has already loosened reality’s stitching. Either way, the “drunk” is telling: it’s less a clinical state than a social role you can slip into.

Contextually, the line fits a late-19th/early-20th century comic sensibility where vice is joked about as performance and masculinity is measured by one’s capacity for excess. Cook’s wit doesn’t moralize; it shrugs and smirks. The joke lands because it flatters a dark idea: we’re not governed by what we consume so much as by what we’re ready to feel.