Alan Coren: Alan Coren, the humorous writer, magazine editor and broadcaster who has died of cancer aged 69, was an extremely funny man.
Dubbed a national treasure of wit by one critic in the New Yorkermagazine, he was even called the natural successor to SJ Perelman - high and unusual praise for a man who had once been criticised as a mere imitator of that magazine's great comic writer.
Coren was author of more than 30 books, a familiar face on British television from the 1970s onwards - he was team captain on Call my Bluff- and a regular on BBC Radio 4's News Quizfrom 1975. The editor of Punchmagazine for nine years and of the BBC's Listenermagazine for one year, Coren's broadcasting and writing made him part of a national discourse. He was an exasperated, irascible commentator on contemporary folly.
Punchwas the magazine that made him. He joined its staff as assistant editor in 1963 when he was 24. In those days, under the editorship of Bernard Hollowood - and despite its new rival Private Eye- Punchwas still an esteemed player in the British media, a position it had held for more than 140 years. Coren became its literary editor in 1966, its deputy editor under William Davis in 1969 and finally Punch'seditor in 1978.
As a writer, Coren had quickly won over Punchreaders, but it was not until the 1970s that he really made a name for himself outside the orbit of the magazine. Curiously, it was when he started writing under the comic guise of Idi Amin, pieces collected in book form as The Bulletins of Idi Amin(1974) and The Further Bulletins of Idi Amin(1975). But when the real Amin was discovered to be a murderous psychopath, Coren's recreation of him as a colourful fool was no longer considered in good taste.
Coren, as editor of Punch, presided over an office that was often filled with laughter. This was especially so at the weekly formal lunches, which gathered together the prominent people of the day. He also had a useful trick of tearing a London telephone directory in two, a genetic gift, he claimed, that he had inherited from a circus strong man grandfather.
Coren made Punchvery much his own and every week his was the first piece in the magazine. He had no taste for the dark humour that was becoming an increasing trend in other publications and he allowed Private Eyeto lead the satirical field - although he once claimed that Punchwas up more frequently in front of the Press Council.
A declining Punchcirculation helped to lead to his resignation in 1987. He was thus the last editor of that old traditional magazine when it was led by practitioners of the comic arts, rather than businessmen in suits and, within a few years, the old stager was dead.
For Coren, a short spell with the Listenerfollowed. The BBC's weekly was losing sales and the corporation was losing faith. Coren stayed from 1988 to 1989 and the paper folded two years later.
Alongside Punch, other work had accumulated. He was TV critic for the Timesfrom 1971 to 1978, a Daily Mailcolumnist from 1972 to 1976 and a Mail on Sundaycolumnist from 1984 to 1992. Coren then produced a column in the Sunday Expressfrom 1992 until 1996 and, from 1988 until his death, he was a regular writer for the Times.
As a contributor his work took in the likes of the Observer, the Atlantic Monthlyand the Spectator.
Born in London, the son of a plumber, Coren was evacuated during the war - one part of his life that failed to offer a seam of humour. Indeed, for such a gregarious person he was strangely quiet about his childhood, except for telling how a man, known as the major, had given him ballroom dancing lessons.
Educated at East Barnet grammar school, he was an open scholar at Wadham College, Oxford, where he got a first. Although a conservative, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament when he was an undergraduate and continued to be a supporter. At Oxford he read English literature - taking in Perelman, James Thurber and Robert Benchley along the way.
From 1961 to 1963 a commonwealth fellowship sent him to the US and the universities of Minnesota, Yale in Connecticut and the University of California at Berkeley. Indeed, he travelled across the vast spaces of America, everywhere, he recalled, from Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park to the Big Sur. He had fallen in love with the country, which, he once said, had given literary humour to the world. Coren had originally planned to continue with his career as an academic - he was working on a doctorate in modern American literature - but while in the US, he began contributing humorous articles to Punch, all of which were accepted, leading to Hollowood offering him a job.
For a humorist who came on the scene in the 1960s, Coren was surprisingly prudish. He married Anne Kasriel, a doctor, in 1963 and was the model of a faithful husband. He could carry this to the point of priggishness. Once he refused to allow a man who had just left his wife into his house and at PunchChristmas parties only wives and husbands, not live-in partners, were invited.
Although he liked his own way and would, as someone said, "resent a straight man", Coren was a modest man and felt he would have to write a novel in order to be considered in the first XI. These were always most serious works full of tricky symbolism.
They were not the novels that publishers wanted from him. Tom Maschler at Cape had offered him a £25,000 advance for a novel about a working-class Jewish boy growing up in wartime London and this was also the novel his regular publisher, Jeremy Robson, wanted from him, but it seemed exactly the part of his life that did not interest him - even if Cricklewood did. From 1976 to 1983 he wrote a series of books for children called the Arthur books and some of these, like Arthur and the Great Detective, in which Arthur meets Sherlock Holmes, had marvellous imaginative leaps.
He was a keen horseman, but did not hunt. He was the rector of St Andrew's University from 1973-1976. He published collections of his humorous pieces almost every year and edited the Penguin Book of Modern Humour(1983) and the Pick of Punch Annualfrom 1979 to 1987. The Best of Alan Corenwas published in 1980 and the Alan Coren Omnibusin 1996. There were six collections about Cricklewood, starting with the Cricklewood Diet(1982) through to the Cricklewood Tapestry(2000).
He is survived by his wife and a son, Giles, and daughter, Victoria, both journalists.
Alan Coren: born June 27th, 1938; died October 18th, 2007.