Humorous Quotes from
W.C. Fields and Me
By Carlotta Monti

I managed to stifle the tears and patch up my face. When a girl is only twenty-four and wrinkle-free, the job is fairly simple. ~ Carlotta Monti

Haven’t been sick a single day since I had tuberculosis as a boy. A steady diet of cigars and whiskey cured me.

I was married once, in San Francisco. I haven’t seen her for many years. The great earthquake and fire of 1907 destroyed the marriage certificate. There’s no legal proof. Which proves that all earthquakes can't be bad.

I'm not going to spread a handkerchief and get down on one knee before you, because my arthritis might hurt when I got up. But I have something important to ask.

The table was a masterpiece, the food tempting enough to make Mahatma Gandhi end one of his periodic fasts. ~ Carlotta Monti

If any unmarried woman loses her equilibrium, she should manage to fall on a millionaire.

That old reprobate would drink a cup of hemlock if it had an olive in it. ~ Gregory La Cava

He (W.C's father) reached Philadelphia, where there was little to do after dark, so he got married.

Philadelphia was a gay, lighthearted town. Anyone found smiling after the curfew rang was liable to be arrested. If a woman dropped her glove on a street, she might be hauled before a judge for stripteasing.

The city (Philadelphia) had so many reformers, they tried reforming each other.

Thank God he’s a comic. Had he been a statesman he’d have plunged the world into total war. ~ Will Rogers

A sacred cow to him was only a hunk of meat to be barbecued. ~ Carlotta Monti

While he was bedridden, his faithful followers kept trooping in to visit him. They brought crazy gag presents. “If you really want to cheer me up,” Woody told Barrymore, “Bring money. And never mind the gift wrapping. A large rubber band will do nicely.”

Interviewer : “Do you have a formula that might be applied to a person wishing to get rich?” W.C : “Yes, when the little beggar is only ten years old, have him castrated and his taste buds destroyed. He’ll grow up never needing a woman, a steak or a cigarette. Think of the money saved,”

I believe in tying the marriage knot, as long as it’s around the woman’s neck.

Marriage is a two-way proposition, but never let the woman know she is one of the ways.

Marry an outdoors woman. Then if you throw her out into the yard for the night, she can still survive.

Never trust your wife behind your back, even if she claims she only wants to wash or scratch it.

An ideal start for matrimony would be to have a drunken rabbi perform a Catholic ceremony in an Episcopalian church. Then it could be declared illegal in the courts.

An additional absurdity is the story of Jonah and the whale. To me this tall tale is a lot of blubber. Or a lot of whale oil. Take your choice.

I might be able to go along with the feat of David who, the Bible tells us, slew Goliath with the jawbone of an ass – if I didn’t read how big this giant was supposed to be. Somehow I have the feeling that the giant would have knocked David on his ass.

In all these Biblical stories the angels fly around more than planes at a busy airport terminal. They must have been pretty smart pilots for I never heard of a single collision.

I've seen plenty of pictures of them, though - always white angels. Where were the black ones? Maybe a deserving dead Negro becomes a white angel.

Comedy is a business. A serious business with only one purpose – to make people laugh.

An infallible rule I have in comedy is never to break anything. Only bend things. If you shatter a flower pot over some harassing oaf’s head, the laughter dies the moment the pot breaks. If you hit him with something that bends, the audience keeps looking at the instrument responsible for the bludgeoning, and the laughs go on. Nothing brittle has any humor. I broke a pool cue once and the house was silent. Next time I got one that looked like iron, bent it, and they went crazy. The best thing to break is a contract.

Show me a comic who isn’t a perfectionist, and I’ll show you a starving man. You have to sweat and toil and practice indefinitely. A comic should suffer as much over a single line as a man with a hernia would in picking up a heavy barbell.

Never test a joke on an Englishman, a Dane, a Norwegian, or a Swede. By the time an Englishman solves one, they're already sweeping out the theatre. As for the others, you're lucky to get a trace of a smile for your trouble. Their faces are too frozen from tough winters to crack into happy expressions.

Professional writers were deadly poison to him. At a dinner party when Woody was asked, “What’s your favorite fish?” he replied, “A piranha in a writer’s bathtub.”

Woody was an expert at either forgetting his cues or purposely not caring to remember them. It took a real pro to run through a scene smoothly with him, and in order to do this you had to watch his eyes: They were the tip-off that he had finished his lines. If an actor were on his toes, he could make a rush to squeeze in a few lines whenever Woody took a deep breath. ~ Carlotta Monti

Woody elaborated on this (a writer saying that Fields can eat a writer alive), asserting that he could devour a writing team in seven minutes flat, but claimed they were hard to digest because all those semi-colons and exclamation marks pricked the lining of his stomach. ~ Carlotta Monti

In describing my voice to Will Rogers, he compared it to “the sounds made by a monsoon whistling up an aardvark’s asshole.” ~ Carlotta Monti

“If I met him (Tony Cordero) coming down the street, would he have an olive in his pocket?” Woody questioned, adding, “That’s the supreme test of a good bartender.”

When you woo a wet goddess, there’s no use falling at her feet.

(Answering an invite for a round of golf with a movie bigwig) Tell Mr. _____ that when I want to play with a prick, I’ll play with my own.

You can take the girl out of a career, but you can't take the career out of the girl – and that’s the way I felt in 1935. There are many contagious germs in the world but none bite with the ferocity, nor cause the lasting sickness of yearning that the movies or the stage do. ~ Carlotta Monti

No doubt exists that all women are crazy, it’s only a question of degree.

Madam, there’s no such thing as a tough child – if you parboil them first for seven hours, they always come out tender.

Asked if he believed in the adage, “Children should be seen and not heard,” he shook his head in disagreement and responded, “I believe children should neither be seen nor heard from ever again.”

I'm already pre-embalmed from all the liquor I've drunk.

I certainly do not drink all the time. I have to sleep, you know.

Somebody get me a sedative . . . with an olive in it.

After three days I took a turn for the nurse.

“Mr. Fields, what would your father have said if he knew you drank two quarts of whiskey a day?” “He would have called me a sissy.”

“Mr. Fields, if you don’t stop drinking you’ll be dead in six months.” “Why, that’s exactly what a German medico in Baden-Baden told me twenty-five years ago. I'm glad to see you doctors agree on something.”

He was as much a perfectionist in his lovemaking as he was in his juggling. He never dropping a cigar box accidentally, and by the same token he never fumbled during a golden moment. ~ Carlotta Monti

(telling what wish he'd made when he saw a falling star) “My wish was that no fragment of the star would fall into my martini.”

John Decker : “Do you think there’s intelligent life on any of the planets?” Fields : “There damn well better be, because there’s none of this one.”

If anyone turns over in his grave it’s because the undertaker sold him a lopsided casket.

The bill “for services rendered” by Dr. Price was for twelve hundred dollars. The moment his eyes fell on the amount he let out a yell that echoed through the house and brought several servants on the run. “It’s calamitous!” he yelped. “Astronomical! Ruinous! Brigandry! Not only that, buy by God, it’s too high!”

I need good teeth so I can draw my upper lip back and snarl. It scares children and keeps them at a safe distance.

I wouldn’t feel safe with any pilot – even if his name were Wright and he had a brother.”

I could juggle anything in my day. Balls, cigar boxes, knives . . . But there was one thing I could never juggle - My income tax.

I don’t want any funeral. Just cremate me. I had enough of the cold ground in my youth.

“On the way to the funeral I saw a sign on a mountainside: JESUS CHRIST SAVES SINNERS. If this is true, Bill has qualified, for he has sinned. ~ Edgar Bergen (delivering Fields' eulogy)

“Bill knew life, and knew that laughter was the way to live it. He knew that happiness depended on disposition, not position. ~ Edgar Bergen (delivering Fields' eulogy)

Note: Lines that have no attribution are attributed to W.C.Fields in the book. I have knocked off the "Fields said", "Woody exclaimed", etc. which reminds me... Woody was the pet name that Carlotta used to call W.C.Fields.

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