Women are like elephants to me. I like to look at them, but I wouldn't want to own one.

In this quip, Fields deploys a deliberately outrageous simile to project the curmudgeonly, commitment-averse persona that became part of his comic brand. The line hinges on a contrast between aesthetic appreciation (“like to look at them”) and the burdens of possession (“own one”), using “elephants” to suggest something large, costly, and difficult to manage. Read as performance, it exemplifies vaudeville-era one-liner humor: a quick, cynical reversal that courts shock and laughter through exaggeration. Read literally, it reflects a dated, objectifying attitude toward women; its lasting circulation owes more to Fields’s cultivated misanthropic image than to any serious argument.