Drown in a cold vat of whiskey? Death, where is thy sting?

The line plays on the biblical taunt “O death, where is thy sting?” (1 Corinthians 15:55), twisting it into Fields’s trademark mock-heroic, alcohol-soaked gallows humor. By proposing an absurdly “pleasant” demise—drowning in whiskey—the speaker treats death not as a solemn inevitability but as something to be heckled and domesticated through wit. The joke depends on incongruity: a “cold vat of whiskey” is both lethal and, in the comic persona associated with Fields, perversely desirable. The quotation exemplifies how Fields’s comedy often deflates piety and sentimentality by substituting worldly appetites and sardonic bravado.