Education is a wonderful thing. If you couldn’t sign your name you’d have to pay cash.

Brown’s quip treats “education” less as lofty self-improvement than as practical literacy with immediate economic consequences. The joke hinges on the ability to sign one’s name: in a credit-based consumer society, a signature functions as authorization, identity, and trust. If you cannot write it, you lose access to credit and must transact only with cash—an everyday penalty for illiteracy. The line also satirizes how modern systems reward those who can navigate paperwork and bureaucracy, suggesting that what passes for “education” is often simply the minimum competence needed to participate in commerce and avoid exclusion.