Once, during prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.

Fields’ line is a dry, self-mocking joke built on reversal. “Food and water” is the baseline of survival, but he frames it as an absurd hardship—implying that what he really considers essential is alcohol. By invoking Prohibition, he taps a widely recognized historical moment of restricted liquor access and turns it into a personal comic grievance. The humor depends on understatement and on Fields’ cultivated persona as a curmudgeonly, hard-drinking skeptic of moral reform. The quip also satirizes temperance rhetoric: instead of celebrating sobriety, he treats it as deprivation, exposing how moral crusades can be experienced (or at least joked about) as intrusive and joyless.