1899–1995 · American humorist & anthologist of wit
Evan Esar spent a long career collecting and classifying other people’s jokes. His Comic Dictionary (1943) arranged comic definitions alphabetically, Esar’s Joke Dictionary followed in 1945, and 20,000 Quips and Quotes (1968) became a standard desk reference — which is why his lines still turn up in crossword clues. He also wrote The Legend of Joe Miller, privately printed for the Roxburghe Club of San Francisco in 1957, a study of the eighteenth-century comedian whose name became a byword for a recycled joke. That is the irony of his appearance here: Esar was a scholar of jokes that had lost their authors, and he has now been handed one.