Life & Wisdom Quote by Evan Esar

A signature is a tiny performance of selfhood, and Evan Esar treats it like a tell in a poker game: you can’t help but leak something. The joke lands because it flatters a very old fantasy - that character is legible if you know where to look - then punctures it with the deadpan add-on, “and sometimes even his name.” That “sometimes” is the blade. It mocks the pseudo-scientific confidence of handwriting analysis (and, by extension, every system that claims to decode the soul from a single artifact) while admitting the obvious truth that a signature’s first job is identification, even when it fails at that.

Esar’s intent is comic, but the subtext is suspicious of respectability theater. A signature is supposed to certify: contracts, checks, authorial presence. Yet in practice it’s often a stylized scribble, a ritual gesture that signals authority while withholding clarity. The line winks at the gap between what institutions demand (a stable, accountable “person”) and what modern life produces (a brand mark, a flourish, a shortcut).

Context matters: Esar wrote in an era when graphology was popular cocktail-party “insight,” and when bureaucracy and mass paperwork made signatures both ubiquitous and increasingly meaningless. The quip survives because we still live inside that contradiction. We’re asked to “sign” ourselves into systems - digital, legal, social - and the mark we leave is treated as proof of integrity, even as it grows more abstract. The punchline suggests a bleak little truth: we’re constantly being “read,” and the reading is often nonsense.