By Conan O’Brien
In the fall of 1991, I joined the writing staff of The Simpsons and I was nervous. The original Simpsons writers’ room was one of the strongest humor think-tanks in the history of modern television, and I worried about fitting in with this revered collection of comedy minds. This feeling was greatly exacerbated whenever I was in the company of the show’s co-creator, Sam Simon. Sam was a brilliant man but he could also be mercurial, intense, and intimidating. If Sam was in a mood, he could rattle you with his long, hard stare and challenging tone. I was always afraid of saying the wrong thing around Sam, especially when it came to comedy.
Several weeks after I was hired, Sam wandered into the writers’ room, hunched over, a lit cigarette in his mouth, and posed the question, “Who are the all-time funniest comedians?” The writers started throwing out the classic names from the past—Buster Keaton, the Marx brothers, and Chaplin (complete with the obligatory “is he too sentimental?” arguments). I hung back, reluctant to offer an opinion, when suddenly Sam turned, gave me a hard look, and asked, “What do you say, Conan?” Without hesitation I answered, “W.C. Fields.” Sam paused, dragged on his cigarette, and said, “Yes.”
A truism about comedy is that you can’t talk about it. Explaining why someone or something is funny is like trying to scoop fog onto an ice cream cone. It doesn’t work and in the process you look like an idiot. So I will keep this simple: W.C. Fields makes me laugh harder than any other comedian of the silver screen era. I don’t “appreciate the artistry of Fields,” I love the man. When I watch W.C. Fields in his best films, I laugh so hard that my wife comes downstairs and asks me if I’m okay.
Good comedy, like precious metal, is immutable. It’s a solid, with a mass and weight that cannot be diminished by time. For me, W.C, Fields is time-lessly funny. And a large part of his appeal is that he is one of the least needy comedians in history. W.C. Fields is not interested in winning us over, which means he has never been in danger of becoming maudlin. Instead, Fields’ character operates without a single principle other than satisfying his own pleasure; he practically defies us to like him. His professed hatred of children and dogs, love of drink, unapologetic cowardice, steadfast determination to avoid an honest day’s work, his seeming absence of conscience—this was a comic who embodied political incorrectness long before the phrase would exist.
As a comic force, Fields is as shifty and elusive as many of the characters he played. He wrote under various absurd pseudonyms, muttered some of his best material, and kept his gaze squinted and tight, affording the audience only the narrowest glimpse of his eyes. He is always backing away, removing his hat only to put it back on immediately. He comes across as more languid than kinetic, but he never sits still. Fields gives the impression that he’s never up to much, but so much happens when he is around. In The Bank Dick he walks out his front door and within three minutes he’s confidently directing a motion picture. And why? Simply because someone asked him if he could. Before the day is out he’s a security guard, and by the end of the week he’s a millionaire. Fields as a writer was bored with the plausible, and relentlessly pushed the envelope of the absurd. The only logic he adhered to was to relentlessly pursue the laugh—seemingly for himself as much as for anyone else.
Everyone has their favorite comedy moments in film, and I’m always surprised at how many of mine belong to Fields. When W.C. Fields loses his bottle of gin out of an airplane window, then—without hesitation—jumps out of the plane after it, I See comic perfection. That leap is so fast and the choice so instinctive that I laugh out loud every single time. If laughing at the same thing over and over again is a sign of idiocy, then that leap from an airplane window is my downfall. In The Golf Specialist, when a little girl tells Fields she has fifty dollars in her piggy bank, again, he instinctively grabs for the bank and physically fights the little girl. Sure, he’s standing in a hotel lobby in full view of many eyewitnesses but, dammit, he is getting that bank from that child. When he knocks a scowling mother-in-law to the ground the moment isn’t cheap or low. It’s triumphantly and anarchically funny.
Fields’ physical prowess in these scenes, and countless others, has never been matched. He was also a masterful juggler, and effortlessly executed trick pool shots, sleight of hand, even cigarette tricks. Any other performer with that level of skill would build his act around it. But for Fields, those tricks are often an afterthought, a side dish. The ping pong match in You Can’t Cheat An Honest Man is one of my favorite comedy set pieces in any movie. Its physical demands and escalation of madness are equal to the war dance scene in Duck Soup, and even as he throws himself around the set Fields barely breaks a sweat.
It has long been a maxim that the best clowns must show pathos. Personally, I don’t believe that, and Fields is the reason why. He never asks for our pity or our understanding. He doesn’t ask anything. He just makes us laugh and laugh hard. Some people wonder why Fields isn’t better known by younger audiences and why his work is not seen more often. My guess is that the answer lies in Fields’ refusal to sit still for introspection. He is always moving away from us, muttering and scheming, angling and wheedling. W.C. Fields remains such a consummate and enigmatic master of comedy that almost 70 years, after his death we are still trying to catch up to him as he ambles, unsteadily, over the horizon. Wherever he is going he is up to no good, and I desperately want to follow.