Life's Pleasures Quote by W. C. Fields

The joke lands because it treats deprivation like an administrative error in a luxury lifestyle. W. C. Fields frames a “safari in Africa” - already a loaded emblem of colonial adventure-for-the-wealthy - as the setup for a crisis so petty it becomes grotesquely funny: no corkscrew. The punchline isn’t that he drank too much; it’s that alcohol is positioned as the real necessity, while “food and water” are demoted to the bleak minimum you’d survive on in an emergency. He flips the hierarchy of needs into a hierarchy of indulgences, and the inversion exposes the speaker as both ridiculous and perfectly self-satisfied.

Fields’ persona thrives on this kind of shamelessness. He doesn’t ask you to admire him; he dares you to judge him, then makes your judgment part of the pleasure. The offhand “somebody forgot” adds a sneaky class signal: there’s always a “somebody” to blame, an invisible servant or underling whose minor mistake forces the privileged narrator into a melodrama of sobriety. It’s a miniature portrait of entitlement, delivered with the deadpan cadence of someone who assumes the audience shares his priorities.

Historically, the line sits comfortably in early 20th-century American comedy, when cocktails, travel, and wisecracks about vice were popular stage currency. It’s also an era when “Africa” could be invoked as an exotic backdrop with zero interest in actual place or people - which is part of the subtext. The continent is scenery; the corkscrew is the plot. That imbalance is the point, and it’s why the gag still bites.