Humor & Life Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields turns panic into a shopping list, and that’s the joke’s engine: the word “case” flips from medical diagnosis to liquor inventory in the span of a breath. It’s a pun with a hangover, built to make self-destruction sound like common sense. The bartender isn’t just service staff here; he’s a co-conspirator in a worldview where anxiety is treated less like an internal crisis than an inconvenience best managed with bulk purchasing.

The intent is classic Fields: deflate respectable ideas of “nerves” (the genteel term for stress, hysteria, overcivilized fragility) by prescribing an unapologetically vulgar remedy. A “case of Scotch” isn’t one drink, it’s an industrial quantity. The exaggeration advertises its own bad faith. You’re not meant to believe this is wisdom; you’re meant to recognize the character who needs it to be true.

Subtextually, the line mocks a culture that romanticizes the hard-drinking man as competent precisely because he refuses introspection. It also sketches a depression-era pragmatism: when institutions fail to soothe, people improvise their own anesthesia. Fields made a career out of the lovable grifter and the dignified wreck, and this line fuses the two. It’s a sales pitch delivered as confession.

Context matters: early 20th-century American comedy often treated drinking as both rebellion and release, especially in the shadow of Prohibition’s moral theater. Fields’ genius is that he doesn’t preach against virtue; he lets virtue look naive by comparison to a joke that lands clean, fast, and bleak.