Humor & Life Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields lands the joke with the deadpan confidence of a man reporting the weather, and that’s the whole con. “Last week, I went to Philadelphia, but it was closed” treats a major American city like a mismanaged shop with a flipped sign in the window. The comic pleasure comes from the grammatical mismatch: “Philadelphia” is too big, too civic, too real to be “closed,” yet the sentence insists on the logic of consumer inconvenience. It’s a gag built on bureaucratic absurdity before “bureaucratic absurdity” became a genre.

The intent isn’t to insult Philadelphia so much as to reframe modern life as a series of petty denials. In Fields’ persona - the suspicious curmudgeon, forever at odds with institutions - the world is run by unseen clerks who can deny you access to anything, even a city. The subtext is a wink at the audience’s own experience of being bounced by schedules, rules, and officiousness: you arrive, you want entry, you’re told no. That pettiness is what makes the exaggeration feel strangely accurate.

Context matters: Fields came up in vaudeville and early film, where economy was everything and a single line had to sketch character, worldview, and punchline. This one does all three. It’s also a classic Fields move: take the plainspoken cadence of a travel anecdote and let it collapse into nonsense, exposing how easily “normal” speech can be weaponized into surreal complaint. The city isn’t closed; the comedian’s relationship to the world is.