W. C. Fields

A few years back a documentary was made for British television entitled “Is Benny Hill Still Funny?”  It involved a contemporary audience sitting in a studio being exposed to the smut merchant for the first time.  The experiment was designed to examine if Hill’s mixture of mugging pratfalls, risque songs and innuendo rich skits could entertain a generation brought up on political correctness.  Unsurprisingly the answer was a resounding ‘yes’.  T & A never goes out of fashion and Hill was all about that and a whole lot more: he could count Charlie Chaplin as a fan, for Christ’s sake!  Any up to the ideological challenge are most welcome to rent some of Benny’s later work from the Auteur House, which is proud to stock it.

The question of whether humour dates or not has been on my mind this week.  Both myself and the hired help have been recommending some new acquisitions to the shop, starring vehicles for a gentleman who could be thought the finest sound comedian in history: W. C. Fields.  The problem is that the only two customers we’ve so far conned into renting gems like “The Bank Dick” and “It’s a Gift” have given up after watching only a few minutes.

Like all the greats, Fields’ humour is grounded in character.  By the time he became a substantial star the former vaudeville juggler was well into his fifties and in the decade or so when he enjoyed most success - basically from 1932 until 1941 - his body deteriorated to a point of no return.  Drinking a bottle of gin a day will do that to you.  Fields was the first openly alcoholic star.  Boozing was a key part of his persona.  His most celebrated one-liner declared “A woman drove me to drink and I didn’t even have the decency to thank her”.

With Fields the implication is always that the world is so awful that it demands constant, if sly, swigging from the hip flask.  An arch misanthrope, he either played con men or hen pecked husbands.  He always has a scheme or two on the go to defraud the gullible, a category of citizen he sees as being in majority.  Two of his film titles - which, like most of his screenplays, he wrote himself, reflect this view - “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man” and “Never Give a Sucker an Even Break”.

Fields’ lack of sentiment or self pity put him at odds with most of 1930s cinema.  His weaker vehicles suffer, like those of those of the Marx brothers, whenever studio interference enforced conventional romantic and/or musical subplots closer to the spirit of that age.  The man who said “anyone who hates children and animals can’t be all bad” and who swore off the consumption of water because “fish fuck in it” is best seen pure and unfettered.  Though our customer base has yet to see the light in these matters, Fields’ wit is essentially eternal.  Who but he could have sufficient sense of timing to die on the day he most loathed: Christmas?

(While the closing sentence is designed as a rhetorical question, its answer is of some interest: others to die on the 25th of December include Charlie Chaplin, Fields’ great contemporary and rival, a man of whom he said “the son of a bitch is a ballet dancer”, and Dean Martin, who more than any other subsequent American film star made Fields’ alcoholic persona his own).