A Tribute to W.C. Fields

W.C. Fields was a true original.

His unique brand of humor owed as much to Mark Twain as it did to the vaudeville stage on which he perfected his art. Fields has been called the great American comedian, and I certainly wouldn’t disagree.

His humor is uniquely American in many ways, but it also had that timeless, universal appeal shared by the great clowns all over the world.

The Lincoln Center in New York City is currently hosting an excellent exhibit on the art of W.C. Fields, called “The Peregrinations and Pettifoggery of W. C. Fields”. It’s wonderful to see such a tribute to “The Great Man”. This exhibit does a wonderful job celebrating his art and humor, including some very rare home movies taken during live stage performances.

For those unfamiliar with Fields work, or only familiar with it through the many imitations and caricatures, they may be surprised to learn of the depth he brought to his screen persona.

Hardly just a comic “type”, Fields instead created deep and personal comic characters, rooted in his own experiences, and portrayed these characters in a series of brilliant films that reflect human foibles and frustrations as well as any work of art has ever accomplished.

In the process, he created some of the best comedies in the history of film.


What Fields did better than perhaps almost any other comedian of his time, or indeed any time, was to explore the everyday frustrations of the average man. Fields would depict, often in almost excruciating detail, the frustrations of waking up in the morning, trying to shave, eating breakfast with his family, and so on. He had the ability to make the smallest gestures and reactions utterly hilarious. Listening to a nagging wife, for instance, he would obediently respond with a repeated mutterings of “Yes, dear”, resigning himself to his station until some form of escape would present itself, often in the form of a kind of comic deus ex machina, and free him from his mundane daily routine.

Of course, Fields could also play the con man par excellence, albeit a con man with a lovable streak that makes audiences forgive his occasionally roguish behavior. As Larson E. Whipsnade in “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man”, Eustace McGargle in “Poppy” or The Great McGonigle in “The Old-Fashioned Way”, Fields presented a series of comic scoundrels that audiences absolutely loved.

Fields was a truly international celebrity, having begun performing on stage in 1898. He quickly became a headliner, and began appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies. His film debut came in 1915 with “Pool Sharks”, a rough knockabout comedy shot in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, New York. What’s remarkable is how much of the characteristic Fieldsian humor is already present in this early film, including a scene where he pulls a chair out from under a child at the picnic. Despite the roughhouse slapstick expected of a film like this, Fields gets a chance to perform his comic pool game routine, except in this case, it’s marred by the use of trick photography to show the balls doing impossible tricks.



This sequence was thankfully captured on film faithfully in “Six of a Kind”, from 1934, with Fields in perfect character as Sheriff “Honest John” Hoxley, explaining to his stooge (the brilliant comic foil Tammany Young, whom Fields always used to great effect) how he came to be known as “Honest John” for returning a man’s lost glass eye!



Unlike many vaudeville comics, who worked like joke-machines, Fields emphasized character and situational humor. This perhaps eased his transition into the narrative film format. He appeared in the hit Broadway show “Poppy” in 1923, which was filmed by the great master D.W. Griffith in 1925, as “Sally of the Sawdust”, and featuring Fields in the role he’d made famous on the stage. He appeared in another film for Griffith, “That Royle Girl” (no prints have survived for viewing today) before launching into a series of comedies for Paramount studios from 1926-1928. About half of the films he made during this period are no longer available for viewing, but the three that survive-“It’s the Old Army Game”, “So’s Your Old Man” and “Running Wild”-indicate that Fields was already adapting his stage routines, such as the sleeping porch episode and the golf routine, to the film medium.



The coming of sound film allowed Fields to fully flesh out his screen presence with his memorable voice and casual asides that really accentuate his frustration over the series of obstacles he must deal with. “The Golf Specialist”, made in Queens at the Astoria Studio, was a two-reel filming of the golf routine that Fields had made popular on stage. In 1931, he arrived in Hollywood, appearing in a supporting role along with fellow Ziegfeld stars Marilyn Miller and Leon Errol, in “Her Majesty Love”, a Warner Bros. musical comedy directed with characteristic flourish by William Dieterle. The following year, appeared in four short comedies produced by Mack Sennett, which allowed Fields to really distill his humor down to its comic essence, and show off his talents unobstructed by the subplots and secondary characters that so often were required elements of feature-length comedies.

Fields’ triumphant return to Paramount Pictures in 1932 came with the delightfully surreal “Million Dollar Legs”, also starring Jack Oakie. Set in the mythical kingdom of Klopstokia, the film was a kind of precursor to political comedies like “Diplomaniacs” and “Duck Soup”. It owed much the old Sennett school of physical comedy (and indeed, many former Sennett clowns appear in the film, including Andy Clyde, Vernon Dent, and-memorably-Ben Turpin), and can be seen as an influence on the later, freewheeling comedies of such greats as Monty Python and Richard Lester.

It was right around this time that Fields rose to cinematic stardom in a series of brilliantly crafted vehicles like “Tillie and Gus”, “You’re Telling Me”, “The Old Fashioned Way”, and “It’s a A Gift”, which is pure comic perfection. This film is structured very masterfully around a very slight narrative (Fields, a small town grocer, wants to buy an orange grove in California), and the plot serves as little more than a clothesline on which to hang a series of brilliant sequences. The sleeping porch routine is an incredible integration of visual comedy and creative sound design, with the sleeping Fields unable to catch more than a few moments’ rest before some other distraction presents itself.



By the mid-30s, Fields had achieved true greatness in film comedy. Unfortunately, due to health issues, his film career slowed somewhat, and he made his last film for Paramount in 1938. Always exploring new media, Fields next turned to radio, where he appeared frequently with comic ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and Fields sparred on-air with ventriloquist’s dummy Charlie McCarthy in a series of memorable quips and comic put-downs. Fields appeared with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy in “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man”, produced by Universal in 1939, which re-started Fields’ film career. He made three more films for Universal: “My Little Chickadee”, in which he was memorably co-starred with Mae West; “The Bank Dick”, which is often regarded as Fields’ finest work; and “Never Give a Sucker An Even Break”, a highly surreal comedy that seemed to mark a bridge between the “old school” of vaudeville comedy, and the emerging radio- and nightclub-inspired comedy of people like Abbott and Costello.



He continued performing right up until his death in 1946, and achieved iconic status in his lifetime, as one of the world’s great clowns. His work was celebrated during the 1940s with a series of screenings of his films at the Museum of Modern Art, and such tributes continue to this day, such as the fitting tribute currently on exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.