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Who really said it

Why Don't You Carry a Wrist Watch Like Everyone Else?

Not Herbert Beerbohm Tree — a Punch joke that predates him Unknown (a 1907 Punch cartoon joke) Earliest known appearance: Punch, March 1907
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

Nobody owns this line. The oldest version anyone has found is a Punch cartoon of March 1907, drawn by the magazine’s F. H. Townsend, in which a passer-by asks a man burdened with a clock whether he would not find it more convenient to carry a watch. For the next forty years the joke was retold with the speaker variously an Irishman’s heckler, a drunk, a boy on roller skates and a knocked-over woman — which is the wording quoted here. Tree acquired it in 1956; Yogi Berra acquired it in 1960 and publicly disowned it.

Last verified 7 Oct 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Why Don't You Carry a Wrist Watch Like Everyone Else?” This is a floating joke, not a quotation. Its earliest known appearance is a Punch cartoon of March 1907 drawn by F. H. Townsend — “Pardon me, Sir, but wouldn't you find it more convenient to carry a watch?” The wrist-watch wording belongs to later retellings, and the line was credited to Herbert Beerbohm Tree only in 1956, in different words.

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the themes of time, simplicity and truth. Theme: "Why Don't You Carry a Wrist Watch Like Everyone Else?". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Why Don't You Carry a Wrist Watch Like Everyone Else?". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Earliest known instance
A cartoon in Punch, drawn by F. H. Townsend
Dated
March 1907, London — reprinted in The Washington Post that April
Nearest wording
A 1945 Reader’s Digest telling, in which a woman says it
Credited to Tree
Hesketh Pearson, Beerbohm Tree: His Life and Laughter (1956)

Funny Man. “Pardon me, Sir, but wouldn’t you find it more convenient to carry a watch?”

That is the 1907 caption as reproduced by Quote Investigator; we could not confirm it independently, because the Internet Archive’s scan of Punch volume 132 does not yield the caption in its OCR. The wrist-watch wording quoted on this page is closest to a 1945 Reader’s Digest version, which reads “everybody else” rather than “everyone else”.

Quote Investigator’s investigation of the joke

How we verified this

  • The chronology here is Quote Investigator’s ↗, which dates the earliest instance to a Punch cartoon of March 1907 by F. H. Townsend and tracks the retellings through 1911, 1912, 1913, 1921, 1928, 1940, 1945, 1946, 1956 and 1960.
  • Tree’s version is the one printed in Hesketh Pearson’s 1956 biography and it is not this sentence: Wikiquote’s Tree page ↗ carries it as “My poor fellow, why not carry a watch?”, said “to a man who was staggering in the street under the weight of a grandfather clock”.
  • The attribution to Yogi Berra is refuted by Berra himself. Quote Investigator quotes his 1961 autobiography on a televised version: “I never said that, either. If I could think of funny things like that, I would be working for Bob Hope.”
  • We tried to reach the cartoon itself in the Internet Archive’s scan of Punch, January–June 1907 ↗ and could not: the phrase does not appear in that volume’s OCR, so the 1907 caption rests on Quote Investigator’s reproduction alone.

No rights status is asserted. The wording quoted here is a retelling of an anonymous joke with no established author, and the version it most closely matches appeared in a 1945 magazine. The 1907 Punch caption that stands behind it would itself be long out of copyright, but it is not the sentence on this page.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

A joke with no author collects famous ones. Four names have been attached to this one in print, and the earliest instance carries none of them.

Herbert Beerbohm Tree Credited in 1956, in different words

Hesketh Pearson’s 1956 biography gives Tree the remark “My poor fellow, why not carry a watch?” — published 39 years after Tree’s death in 1917, and half a century after the Punch cartoon ↗. It is also not the wrist-watch wording quoted here.

Yogi Berra Denied it himself

Joe Garagiola’s 1960 book put Berra on the receiving end of the line; a televised retelling then had Berra deliver it. In his 1961 autobiography Berra answered: “I never said that, either.”

George du Maurier Wrong Punch cartoonist

In 1913 and again in 1914 the joke was credited to du Maurier, who had died in 1896, and it was even voted the “world’s best joke” on that basis. The 1907 cartoon was drawn by F. H. Townsend ↗. Quote Investigator allows that an earlier du Maurier cartoon may exist but reports it has not located one.

A drunk in the street One telling among many

The heckler is an inebriate in 1911, a drunken man in 1912, a boy on roller skates in 1913, a “pre-Volstead man” in 1921 and a knocked-down woman in 1945. The instability of the scene is the clearest sign this is a gag in circulation rather than a remembered remark.

There is no original speaker to name. The oldest known version is a cartoon caption printed in Punch in March 1907, and every famous name attached to the joke since then arrived decades later — as Quote Investigator documents ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

The joke is a small machine for showing how attribution actually works. It began anonymous, in a magazine that printed gags by the hundred, and then drifted toward whoever was famous for being funny at the time — a celebrated Edwardian actor-manager in Britain, a celebrated malapropist ballplayer in America.

What makes it unusually well documented is that one of those men objected. Berra spent a career having lines invented for him, and his autobiography is unusual in the quotation record for flatly denying a joke that flattered him.

It began as nobody's line. Fame supplied the rest.

Read the full story

Punch was the dominant British humour magazine of the period, and F. H. Townsend (1868–1920) was a staff illustrator who became its first art editor. A caption like this one was house work, not authored wit, which is part of why no name travelled with the joke.

Tree (1852–1917) was an actor-manager famous enough for his own anthology of quips, and such collections are where orphan jokes tend to land. The 1956 biography that first gives him this one is sympathetic rather than source-critical, and it supplies no date, place or witness.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Time Simplicity Truth

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: “Why Don’t You Carry a Wrist Watch Like Everyone Else?”quoteinvestigator.com

The anchor investigation: the 1907 Punch cartoon and every retelling from 1911 to 1969, dated.
Herbert Beerbohm Treeen.wikiquote.org

Carries Tree's actual version — “My poor fellow, why not carry a watch?” — with its grandfather-clock setting.
Herbert Beerbohm Treeen.wikipedia.org

The actor-manager himself (17 December 1852 – 2 July 1917), for the dates that rule out the 1907 cartoon being his.
F. H. Townsenden.wikipedia.org

The Punch illustrator who drew the earliest known instance (25 February 1868 – 11 December 1920).
Punch (magazine)en.wikipedia.org

The London humour magazine where the joke first appears, and the reason the caption has no byline.
Punch, January–June 1907 (vol. 132)archive.org

The volume that should contain the March 1907 cartoon. Noted here for completeness: the caption is not recoverable from this scan’s OCR.
Yogi Berraen.wikipedia.org

The later magnet for the joke, and the one person on record denying it.

The author

About the source of this joke

Unknown (a 1907 Punch cartoon joke)

Earliest known appearance: Punch, March 1907 · author unrecorded

No author is known. The joke’s oldest documented appearance is an unsigned cartoon caption in Punch in March 1907, drawn by the magazine’s illustrator F. H. Townsend; Punch captions of the period were often worked up editorially rather than credited to a writer. It was reprinted in American newspapers within months and retold for the next four decades with a different speaker almost every time, which is why the wording quoted today matches none of the early versions exactly.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The earliest documented source

Townsend, F. H. Cartoon caption, Punch (London), March 1907: “Pardon me, Sir, but wouldn’t you find it more convenient to carry a watch?” Earliest instance located by Quote Investigator; reproduced there rather than verified in the volume scan.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Why Don't You Carry a Wrist Watch Like Everyone Else?’?” Last verified 7 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/why-dont-you-carry-a-wrist-watch-like-everyone-else/

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