Humor & Life Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields turns self-improvement into a vaudeville gag by treating relapse as proof of discipline. The line is built like a bit of friendly advice - "don't say you can't" - then flips, deadpan, into an arithmetic confession: if he's sworn off drinking a thousand times, the problem isn't the difficulty of quitting, it's the ease of making promises you don't intend (or aren't able) to keep. The punchline lands because it mimics the motivational language of sobriety and willpower, then exposes how performative that language can be when addiction is in the room.

The intent isn't moral instruction; it's deflation. Fields makes the audience complicit in a very American fantasy: that vice is just a switch you can flip with enough grit. By boasting about repeated abstinence, he ridicules the bootstrap myth without ever getting preachy. The comedy comes from the mismatch between the seriousness of "swearing off" and the casualness of doing it "a thousand times", as if vows were disposable consumer goods.

Context matters. Fields' screen persona - the ornery, self-sabotaging crank - thrived in an era when drinking jokes could be both an echo of Prohibition and an escape hatch from its pieties. Alcohol becomes a proxy for any habit we keep renaming as "just one last time". The subtext is oddly modern: our talent for rebranding failure as progress, and our faith that intention counts as change. Fields doesn't deny the struggle; he just refuses to let self-deception pose as heroism.