Humor & Life Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields’ line lands like a spit-take because it compresses a whole era’s masculine bravado into a single, expertly timed dodge. “Women are like elephants” sets up a compliment-adjacent comparison - elephants are impressive, majestic, worth watching. Then he swerves: “I like to look at ’em” keeps the gaze safely at a distance, turning admiration into spectatorship. The punch comes from the last clause, where “own” yanks romance into the language of property and responsibility. It’s funny because it’s blunt, and because it’s ugly in a way the audience is meant to recognize without having to name.

The subtext is classic Fields: commitment is a trap, domesticity is a burden, and the speaker’s freedom is the only sacred value. The “elephant” metaphor does double duty. Elephants are large, expensive, hard to manage; the joke frames women as monumental and inconvenient, a spectacle that becomes a problem the moment it demands care, space, or reciprocity. That’s the cynical engine: desire without obligation, pleasure without consequence.

Context matters. Fields’ persona was the misanthropic, hard-drinking curmudgeon who treated social niceties as scams. This bit belongs to vaudeville and early Hollywood’s marketplace of one-liners, where sexism was less a transgression than a shared wink - a way to flatter male audiences by turning marriage into a cautionary tale. Today it reads harsher because the “own” is not just a joke mechanism; it’s a fossil record of entitlement. The line still “works,” but it works like a relic: a tight comic construction powered by a worldview we’ve stopped pretending is harmless.