America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.

Esar’s line is a satirical inversion of a civic platitude. It begins with the earnest claim that “America believes in education,” then undercuts it by pointing to pay scales that (in his joke) reward celebrity athletics far more than academic labor. The humor depends on exaggeration and on the reader’s awareness of the cultural prestige and commercial power of professional sports. As with much of Esar’s aphoristic comedy, the point is less statistical accuracy than social critique: a society may praise learning rhetorically while valuing entertainment economically. The quip also plays on the word “average,” implying that even a typical professor is out-earned by an athlete at a dramatically faster rate.