I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. They wake up in the morning and that’s the best they’re going to feel all day.

Cast as a wry one-liner, the remark trades on Dean Martin’s public persona—an easygoing nightclub and television entertainer closely associated (in image, if not always in fact) with drinking culture and the Rat Pack’s late-night glamour. The joke hinges on inversion: sobriety is framed not as a virtue but as a deprivation, because the non-drinker’s “best” feeling arrives at the day’s start, whereas the drinker can supposedly improve on it later. Read critically, it’s less an argument for alcohol than a performance of comic bravado, using exaggeration to signal insouciance and to flatter an audience that recognizes the routine’s self-mythologizing.