Victor Borge, who died on December aged 91, was not the first comedian to have contrived his act from sending up or mutilating serious music. But he did it with more style than anyone else and in a way which had more widespread and long-lived appeal.
He continued to play his piano, or hilariously failed to play his piano, on tours of the United States, where he mainly lived, and Europe, from where he originated, well into his 80s.
Victor Borge always claimed his deadpan humour succeeded because it was simple and drawn straight from life. If so, its simplicity was that of genius, of being able to impose a thread of distorted but impregnable logic on to almost any set of circumstances.
Victor Borge the comic, whose command of the piano was (on stage) liable to grotesque accident, so that a simple piano stool could narrowly escape being a disaster area, turned even his imperilled past as a Danish Jew into the humour of mock conceit: "Only Churchill and me knew how dangerous Hitler was. Churchill was trying to save Europe, and I was trying to save myself."
Born in Copenhagen, Victor Borge was the son of a violinist with the Royal Danish Philharmonic. His mother introduced him to the piano from the age of three, and he made his stage debut at the age of eight.
There was one great problem which he had to face in his early career - the quality of the onsite pianos he had to play. Some were dreadful, so he developed tricks for playing them not taught by conventional teachers. Out of that situation came his humorous movements and asides, always in a distinctive, unctuous, throwaway voice.
By the outbreak of the second World War, he was a reasonably successful pianist and musical satirist in Denmark, well known for his ridiculing of Hitler and other Nazis. When the Germans invaded Denmark, newspapers reported that his name was at the head of those destined for extermination.
Fortunately for Victor Borge, two Russian diplomats who had been amused by his act smuggled him aboard an American ship bound for Finland, from where he caught the last boat out to the free part of Europe.
Once in New York, however, Victor Borge was handicapped by not knowing a word of English. He studied it in cinemas on 42nd Street, watching the same films round and round until he made some sort of sense of what the characters were saying.
He read lines for the warm-up of a radio show, which led to him being invited to do the same sort of job on air for the Bing Crosby Kraft Music Hall. He understood hardly anything of what he was reading, but his ruptured English made him a success with listeners. He made music and comedy records for the US war effort, and afterwards developed a repertoire of 15,000 jokes or routines, from which he could make a selection to suit any audience.
He devised variations on an early performance, when he had been trying to play seriously. Not trusting his memory, he stuck sheet music inside the piano lid, only to find that in performance it was peeling off around him like leaves in a storm. The counterpoint between his lugubrious dignity and the bizarre things that befell him - like being blasted off his piano stool by a soprano's top note, then producing a safety belt from the stool - could be hilarious.
In the 1970s, when more boisterous sorts of comedy became fashionable, he seemed to falter, complaining that the tabloids called him a has-been. However, he invigorated his act by introducing as partners a succession of attractive young women.
By the 1980s, Victor Borge had got his second wind and looked like going on for ever as an international touring artist. By the 1990s, his initial suspicion of television - he thought his material too narrowly-based for constant TV exposure - had disappeared entirely. He continued touring, with a sell-out audience at London's Barbican Centre for his 1992 tour of the US, Australia and Britain.
His work for good causes, including Thanks To Scandinavia, a scholarship fund to commemorate Scandinavian efforts to help victims of Nazi persecution, earned him honours in several countries. But bringing laughter pleased him even more than honours.
"The shortest distance between two people is a smile," was one of his favourite sayings. He is survived by a son and daughter from his first marriage, and a son and two daughters from his second.
Borge Rosenbaum (Victor Borge): born 1909; died, December 2000