You must realize that honorary degrees are given generally to people whose SAT scores were too low to get them into schools the regular way. As a matter of fact, it was my SAT scores that led me into my present vocation in life, comedy.

In typical self-deprecating Neil Simon fashion, the line turns a ceremonial honor into a joke about academic gatekeeping and personal inadequacy. By claiming honorary degrees go to people who could not get in “the regular way,” Simon punctures the prestige of institutional validation while also mocking his own scholastic credentials. The punch line reframes a potentially embarrassing metric—low SAT scores—as a kind of providential misdirection: what barred him from conventional academic success nudged him toward comedy, where his talents actually lay. The humor masks a serious point about how standardized measures can misread ability and how “failure” can redirect a life toward a better-fitting vocation.