Content area
Full text
Laugh Lines Treasures from W.C. Fields's personal archive W.C. Fields by Himself Edited by Ronald J. Fields Taylor Trade, $18.95
An object of fun, W.C. fields readily becomes an object of obsession too. I find myself replaying isolated bits, or whole strings of gags, from his movies. The idea is to figure out what makes a joke tick-why every single toss of fake snow in The Fatal Glass of Beer followed by Fields's lack of reaction adds up to a winner. But I'm generally chuckling too much to break it down. (Sometimes the movie itself repeats the gag; perhaps as a result of this priming, "It ain't a fit night out for man or beast" echoes in my brain with alarming frequency.)
The scrutiny was also a habit of the performer: W.C. Fields by Hitnself demonstrates, in the sometimes incongruous medium of print, how closely the comic worked on these routines. Subtitled "His Intended Autobiography" and jam-packed with detail, the volume of correspondence, scripts, notes, and miscellany was originally printed in 1973 and was.edited by his grandson Ronald. Its publication followed an upsurge in Fields's popularity in the Sixties; in 1971, Fields for President, a 1940 goof on a presidential campaign, was also reprinted. It was also 10 years after the death of W.C.'s widow Hattie Fields, long regarded as an inspiration...