Fields of Glory

The absurdist anti-politics of W.C. Fields.

Paul A. Cantor from the May 2000 issue

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Fields himself sometimes ran afoul of the law in ways that can only make us honor him as an early martyr to political correctness. In 1928 he was hauled into court in New York on charges of cruelty to a canary. The local Humane Society had accused him of mistreating the bird in one of his dentist sketches on Broadway and being responsible for its death. Fields was acquitted on the grounds that the canary had actually been killed when the Humane Society officers tried to have it photographed as evidence and the smoke from the flashbulbs asphyxiated it. This story may be apocryphal--Simon Louvish's wonderful 1997 biography of Fields, Man on the Flying Trapeze, suggests that the affair may have originated as a publicity stunt--but in any case it offers an apt parable of how regulation can backfire.

Killing canaries was no doubt incidental to Fields' achievements as a comedian, but in one respect his conflict with an intrusive society went straight to the heart of his art. He found himself constantly at odds with the Hollywood censors. Fields' humor was often off-color and his sight gags were occasionally mildly obscene, though by today's standards his bawdiness seems almost tame. What strikes us now is the incredible pettiness of the censors Fields had to deal with. In 1939 he got into trouble over a line in the script for his film with Mae West, My Little Chickadee: "I know what I'll do, I'll go to India and become a missionary. I know there's good money in it, too." As Louvish documents, the line was challenged by Joseph Breen, an official with the motion picture censorship board, because the now infamous Hays Production Code ruled out anything "suggestive of an unfavorable, or derogatory, or comedy, reflection on the gentlemen of the cloth."

Hoping to salvage his script in foreign markets, Fields wrote directly to Breen in a desperate effort to save the line: "Will this also have to be deleted from the European version or does that not come under your jurisdiction? I've got to get a laugh out of this picture somewhere even if it's down in India." Fields' humor was evidently lost on Breen, who became even more picky when dealing with Fields' 1941 movie Never Give a Sucker an Even Break. Breen was determined not to let Fields get away with anything this time and his memo to the studio is quite explicit and peremptory: "Any and all dialogue and showing of bananas and pineapples is unacceptable."

In a heroic gesture on behalf of denture-wearers everywhere, Breen put his censorious foot down: "The business of the man taking out his false teeth strikes us as a piece of business which will give offense to mixed audiences"--a sentence so preposterous it sounds like something Fields himself might have written. Indeed, faced with the ultimate busybody, he could only respond by making censorship itself the butt of his comedy in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, with the famous line: "This scene was supposed to be in a saloon, but the censor cut it out."

Fields' vision might best be described as absurdist anarchism or anarchic absurdism. He ridiculed all figures of authority mercilessly, revealing them as petty, pompous, and silly, and exposing their efforts to govern our lives as meddlesome, misguided, and inept. He celebrated the spirit of individualism and enterprise, even when the entrepreneurs took eccentric or morally questionable forms, like the gadget inventor, the carny barker, or the patent medicine salesman. As a champion of free speech and an opponent of the federal income tax, Big Labor, puritanical experiments like Prohibition, and intrusive regulation in general, Fields ought to be a hero for our time.

Alas, I can find no evidence of his actually getting any votes in the 1940 election. Yet his record shows that he understood American liberty better than any of the men--FDR, Wilkie, and Thomas--he was running against. As one contemplates the political scene today, one can only wish that we had a satirist with Fields' wit and courage to give our politicians what they deserve. To paraphrase Wordsworth on Milton, "Fields, thou shouldst be living at this hour." Or, more to the point: "W.C. Fields: Now more than ever."