W.C. Fields

"Don't be a luddy-duddy! Don't be a mooncalf! Don't be a jabbernowl! You're not those, are you?" This weekend I finally saw The Bank Dick in its entirety, and I'm once again convinced that W.C. Fields was a comic genius, a fascinating character who towered over a golden age when lowbrow humor was actually funny. Compare Fields with one of his direct descendants, Adam Sandler, and you'll know what I mean. Rather than outrageously magnifying the universals of human experience (like a Charlie Chaplin or Richard Pryor), Fields paraded through vaudeville and movies as a strange, singular, non-sympathetic beast. His standard character was that of a hilarious liar, a phony schemer, an agile klutz (he always had problems putting on his hat), and a perpetually thirsty drunk ("who stole the cork from my lunch?"). No one could mutter sarcastically -- inaudibly -- under his breath the way Fields did. Of course you could say the whole act was lifted from Shakespeare's Falstaff, though I doubt Falstaff would recognize himself in Fields, nor could Fields ever play a good Falstaff. The core of Fields ouevre consists of a handful of interchangeable Depression-era flicks -- he wrote most of 'em himself (no S.J. Perelman types to doctor his scripts!), and the plots are preposterous vehicles for his strange persona. Highbrow film students tend to prefer the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin -- who intentionally played the modernist sensibility straight. But Fields was stuck in his own world of soused, unheroic charm. His most modern characteristics were an ability to invent new cuss words ("Godfrey Daniel! Mother of Pearl!"), his genuine misanthropy (funnier than Ty Cobb, anyway), and an all-embracing love of capitalism. These are not the things to be celebrated in Cahiers du Cinema. So for years the campus Film Societies passed him by. Still, Roger Ebert selected The Bank Dick as one of his Top 100 Greatest Movies of All Time ( though one could argue that It's a Gift, You Can't Cheat an Honest Man, and The Man on the Flying Trapeze were superior Fields performances). And nowadays people are noticing that he's actually genuinely funny in practice -- rather than just funny in theory like the Marx Brothers. Fields was an inveterate liar in real life, and my favorite thing about it is that there is still no agreement on what were his last words. When he died on Christmas Day, 1946, he was allegedly with his mistress Carlotta. Or he was with his accountant. Here, anyway, is my summary of the Five Things W.C. Fields Allegedly Said on His Deathbed:

1. "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia.": Of course, he never said this, and it is not his epitaph (another rumor). He submitted it to an all-star magazine feature where living celebrities choose their joke epitaphs (Dorothy Parker submitted "Excuse My Dust", for example). Fields was pretty sick of the joke by the time he died.
2. "So I have enough money to buy every child in NYC a bicycle? Well, fuck 'em": His final words, said to his accountant before dying. Actually , this is fairly plausible, although I doubt his accountant would have been visiting him on Christmas day.
3. "I'm looking for loopholes": Said when a visitor asked why he was reading the Bible. Funny line, though I think it's stolen from all those David Hume deathbed scenes that were circulating among the intelligentsia. Probably not true.
4. "God damn everyone in the whole fucking world and everyone in it but you, Carlotta.": I think this is pretty close to what his dying words really were. Perfect rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light line for an atheistic drunk misanthrope. Carlotta was his mistress, who was apparently at his side when he died.
5. No last words He silently touched the side of his nose, winked, and quietly passed away. This is the account propagated by his grandson, who has crusaded relentlessly to clean up W.C. Fields' image. Too bad he stole this deathbed scene from The Night Before Christmas, or it might actually be believable!

W.C. Fields page by m.a.d. 2.06.2002