Humor & Life Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields gets the laugh by smuggling pessimism into what sounds like practical romance advice. "Never try to impress a woman" isn’t really instruction; it’s an exaggeration engineered to flatter male anxiety. The punchline lands on the dread of performance: if you start with fireworks, you’re sentenced to a lifetime of fireworks. Courtship becomes labor, and love becomes a contract with escalating deliverables.

The specific intent is to invert the usual self-help script. Instead of "be your best self", Fields nudges you toward strategic mediocrity. That’s comic mischief: he’s not advocating honesty so much as warning that any act of charm is an unsustainable con. The subtext is sharply transactional. The woman is cast as the one who "expects", a word that frames her not as a partner but as a standards enforcer; the man becomes the harried employee of his own persona. It’s a joke built on defensive masculinity, where the fear isn’t rejection but obligation.

Context matters: Fields’ era sold romance through etiquette, status, and display, while modern consumer culture was teaching people to market themselves. Fields, a comedian with a cultivated persona of the curmudgeonly, corner-cutting rascal, punctures that aspirational pressure. His cynicism plays like a preemptive excuse: don’t blame me for not delivering; blame the premise that love requires ongoing spectacle.

It works because it’s both ugly and recognizably human: the suspicion that intimacy asks us to maintain a highlight reel, and the temptation to dodge that by never starting the show.