Life's Pleasures Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields’ joke is engineered like a trapdoor: it starts in the language of hardship, then drops you into a worldview where the real deprivation isn’t hunger, it’s sobriety. “Forced to live” borrows the melodrama of survival stories, but the punchline exposes the absurdity of calling “food and water” a crisis. That mismatch is the mechanism. It lets Fields posture as a victim while revealing he’s the kind of man who treats pleasure as a necessity and necessity as an insult.

The specific intent is to mock Prohibition-era moralism without delivering a sermon. Fields doesn’t argue against the Volstead Act; he performs its consequences on his own body, making the state’s attempt to regulate vice look petty and joyless. The subtext is a middle finger to reformers: if your idea of virtue is a life of plain sustenance, then virtue is just another word for punishment. It’s also a self-portrait. Fields’ comic persona is the perpetually put-upon scoundrel, a man allergic to uplift and suspicious of anyone selling it.

Context matters because Prohibition (1920-1933) was a massive national experiment in legislated restraint that predictably birthed speakeasies, bootlegging, and a thriving culture of winking noncompliance. Fields’ line lands as a joke about scarcity, but it’s really a joke about authority. He’s not confessing alcoholism so much as claiming, with theatrical indignation, that life policed into righteousness isn’t life at all. The audacity is the point: he makes indulgence sound like a civil liberty.