This one is hilariously misattributed always. It’s from Lawrence Roman.
Who?
He wrote the 1961 play and the 1963 movie scripts for Under the Yum-Yum Tree, where the line "I always feel sorry for people who don’t drink, because when they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re gonna feel all day” was said by the character played by Jack Lemmon.
Source is the unimpeachable Barry Popik.
Such a wise man. Thank you for sharing that.
Hm… Actually, I think that is mostly my own construction. It looks like the original had nothing to do with alcohol:
Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver. --William James
That one has been on way too many fraternity party shirts all over the country.
It’s on way too message boards over the country.
An intriguing thought. Do you know the reasoning behind it?
Mainly because it was safer to drink than water until they found out that boiling water first killed most of the germs, or adding certain chemicals did the same.
I thought liquor is quicker was Dorothy Parker.
No, although her reliance upon it was legendary enough to warrant a label named for her.
Not fair to Edna St Vincent Millay and Sandy Denny, who each died from falling drunk but didn’t get shit named after them.
I understand it to mean that sans alcohol to lower inhibitions the frequency of sexual intercourse would be much reduced.
To put it another way, there are a lot of people who would never get laid with both partners sober.
Not a cite or anything but there was a Scientific American article back in the '90s that mentioned that until the late 19th century people generally drank alcohol (in the form of diluted beer etc) instead of just water, for that reason.
Mormons and Muslims seem to keep their numbers growing.
Forty years too late: Ogden Nash wrote the line in 1931.
It was very well known when the movie came out.
What Does Candy Is Dandy But Liquor Is Quicker Mean? - Writing Explained.
Gelett Burgess, the “Purple Cow” guy? I think I read a blurb on him once. We’d have to be a bunch of goops to forget him!
Sounds like Harding, but I don’t really know.
Frank Gelett Burgess, and ISWYDT
Nice. All three? Purple Cow, blurb, and goops?
Yeps.
Interesting guy. When an undergraduate at MIT he said that he climbed to the tops of all the church steeples in Boston (on the inside – not the outside) and left his monogram in Phoenician there. I’ve found his monogram in a few books, but I haven’t been able to find it in any of the steeples that I can trace back to his era.
“Candy is dandy and liquor is quicker
You can drink all the liquor down in Costa Rica
Ain’t nobody’s business but my own”
~~Taj Mahal, 1972
Your quote “Candy is dandy, liquor is quicker” was created by that clever poet and humorist, Ogden Nash.
When the Flower Children ascended upon the land, and insisted marijuana was better than booze for everything, Mr Nash added to his saying, “Candy is dandy, liquor is quicker. Pot is not.”
~VOW