Life & Mortality Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields takes the most sacred props in the human drama - hope, life, death - and treats them like cheap stage furniture. That’s the gag and the sting. “When we have lost everything” is already melodrama; “including hope” twists the knife, pushing the premise into total emotional bankruptcy. Then he lands the real inversion: life, the supposed prize, becomes “a disgrace,” while death, the supposed tragedy, becomes “a duty.” It’s comedy by moral reversal, a deadpan parody of the sermons and patriotic speeches that dress suffering up as character-building.

The intent isn’t a sincere endorsement of suicide or nihilism; it’s a burlesque of the way society demands dignity from people who’ve been stripped of it. “Disgrace” hints at public judgment as much as private despair: the shame of failure, poverty, aging, or simply not keeping up appearances. “Duty” mocks the civic and religious language that turns personal ruin into an obligation to behave correctly - even to exit correctly.

Fields, a comedian whose screen persona was often a beleaguered, cornered man (frequently undercut by drink, bad luck, or authority), understood despair as a performance imposed from the outside. The line works because it escalates with perfect, ugly logic, then snaps into an outrageous conclusion that exposes how brittle our “uplifting” narratives can be. It’s not a manifesto. It’s a comic refusal to let suffering be sold as noble.