Alan Coren was one of Britain’s foremost humorists, finding the comedy of life all around him and rendering it, hilariously and compellingly, in polished and witty prose. He started on Punch, and rose to be Editor, wrote just as effectively for newspapers, not least The Times, and was a masterly broadcaster, above all on The News Quiz on radio.

He was a highly erudite man, meticulous about language, and a very thoughtful comic writer and performer. The man and the amiable persona were one, but he knew precisely what he was doing, and carefully judged the resonance of all of the millions of words he juxtaposed. He was a fine writer because he controlled the tone of his voice, and knew when an abrupt change of tone would tickle or provoke.

Coren thought about language, its oddities and revelations. He honoured it — his ambition was to invent a word that would immortalise him in the Oxford English Dictionary — and with it he defied the ordinary and clichéd. Recalling the vacuity of a media party he wrote: “I found myself shallow in conversation with. . .” Another item began: “These days, I rarely give long shrift to the felicitous misprint.”

He could write about anything or next to nothing, wringing, for instance, 400 words out of his experience of being late for a lunch with the Duchess of York. Although he did not write political commentaries, he often expressed sincere social convictions. On the whole, he did not feel that British life had improved.

“I always enjoyed writing and reading humour more than anything else,” he said. “I respond to a bit of sentimentality or nostalgia, but comedy moves me more than anything.”

Britain’s literary tradition, he thought, was full of humour: “All the immortals are comic, from Chaucer to P. G. Wodehouse. There is this lovely wickedness in England, and this, combined with our class system and our enormous vocabulary, makes us a seedbed of humour.” He was a great admirer of Evelyn Waugh, Richmal Crompton, Keith Waterhouse and Michael Frayn, as well as the Americans H. L. Mencken and James Thurber.

The son of a plumber, he was born in North London in 1938 with, as the New Statesman put it, “a silver spoof in his mouth”. He was evacuated to Blackpool during the war before returning home to be educated in East Barnet. An inspirational English teacher at the grammar school, Annie Brooks, got him to read: newspapers, magazines, novels, humour. She encouraged him to join Boots library, and lent him her own books.

Impressed by his talent for words, she persuaded his reluctant parents that he must try for university. He was interviewed for Worcester College, Oxford, by Christopher Ricks, who turned him down, but was then offered a scholarship by Wadham, where he took a first in English.

He considered but rejected an academic career. He had had some serious short stories published by Faber, and from Oxford he won a Commonwealth Fellowship for 1961-63. He proceeded to Yale and then Berkeley, where he wrote a thesis on punctuation — an art of which he remained a master.

He found Berkeley “the funniest place I had ever been to”, and began to send dispatches to Bernard Hollowood, the Editor of Punch, who summoned him to join the magazine with which he was to be associated for nearly 25 years. He became the youngest assistant editor, at 24, in 1963, and published his first collection, The Dog It Was That Died, two years later. He was promoted to literary editor in 1966, and was deputy editor to William Davis from 1969.

At the same time he was in constant demand from other publications, writing for Tatler, Atlantic Monthly, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement and The London Review of Books. He was a hilarious and very direct television critic for The Times, 1971-78, and a columnist on the Daily Mail, 1972-76, and subsequently The Mail on Sunday.

He wrote a host of humorous books for adults, such as The Sanity Inspector, which was perhaps his comic masterpiece, and edited a dozen or more anthologies. During the 1970s he wrote regularly for comedy sketch shows on television, though a solo effort, The Losers, a situation comedy about wrestling starring Leonard Rossiter, sank with all hands. Not all his projects reached the screen. He once joked that he had been responsible for more dead pilots than Goering.