Alan Coren died on Thursday night. The obit pages will do their stuff but, hell, it doesn’t feel right somehow. Some sort of cockup. There’ll be repercussions, you wait. Words will be had. Red faces. Deputy heads will roll . . .

On his 35th birthday, Coren wrote a piece about reaching the mid-point of the canonical span. “The weather would choose tonight to break,” he began (I can quote it from memory; if poetry is “memorable speech” then Coren was a poet), before comparing his achievements with those who had died younger: Mozart, Keats, Jesus, Bix Beiderbecke. “And here to present his new opera, The Eve of St Agnes, is Alan Coren, Son of God and first cornet.”

The narrative was set, as so much of his best stuff, in a terrible pub: this time the Halfway House. And there was “Death, in the snug, under the clock, biding his time”.

Well, with a fine and terrible irony, Death jumped the gun, just shy of Alan’s three score and ten. He would have appreciated the gag. But the rest of us don’t.

I worked closely with Alan every day for more than a decade at the old Punch magazine, a strange and magical place: collegiate without the horrors of college politics, relaxed and informal, we spent a lot of time laughing. How many people can say that about their work? We also, of course, moaned about Coren. “Mad bastard” was the usual starting bid – but writers and cartoonists have always condemned the editor and Coren ran the magazine as an affable despot: the Monday morning editorial meetings were more entertaining than any cocktail party, but we knew we had to deliver. Al would shut himself in his huge office, from which would come curses and roars of dismay and occasional summonses – “Bywater!” – because he wanted to try out a gag.

His word was law. Although theoretically we had a triumvirate with individual powers of veto, Coren made the running. I once made the mistake of writing a riff about a woman with a vibrator. He wouldn’t have it. The joke was, he said, structurally illogical. I argued. He shouted. I argued some more. He shouted even louder.

Soon the entire editorial staff had gathered in the doorway of his office as he stood, legs akimbo, like some empurpled Mussolini, bellowing with righteous anger. I couldn’t resist it and took another poke. Alan swelled to twice his normal size and went scarlet. Hitting a volume that can’t have been heard since Soviet Russia set off the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba, he declared that if I “argued the ****ing toss any more, I am going to get aaanngryyyy”.

There was a stunned silence, then a swell of applause, after which things returned to normal. Or as normal as they ever got.

Looking back it was, of course, fairyland. It couldn’t last and it didn’t. Under the direction of a diminutive, thick-spectacled chairman, Lord Stevens – a man who once sent word to the dining room where we were holding our weekly Friday lunch that he could hear laughter and that it had to stop – the management suits gradually stitched up Coren until he had no choice but to leave.

After that the magazine went into terminal decline, although Alan said it would have been fine if they had appointed Bill Tidy, the cartoonist, as his successor. As he put it: “They asked Bill why he wanted to be editor of Punch. Bill said he didn’t, it was his wife’s idea. They asked him if he’d ever edited anything before, and Bill said no, but he grew his own tomatoes. And the fools knocked him back.”

The suits – a series of hapless and, in the context of Punch, utterly undistinguished men – won in the end. Not even Alan’s electric blue showbiz suit could dent their terrible self-assurance, but nor could they dent his legacy. His writing was unique and, when he was on song, unmatched: an extraordinary gift for parody, the ability to turn a gag on a sixpence, a linguistic dexterity equal to S J Perelman at his finest, but without Perelman’s self-conscious virtuosity.

Some of his finest “stuff” (we always called it “stuff”, concerned to avoid writerly pretension) would be impossible now: The Chronicles of Magoon (latest of the small African independencies) with its cast of small-time incompetents holed up in the gouting greasy tropical rains but, at heart, no more than a pastiche of a self-important, underfunded parks committee in Coren’s beloved Cricklewood; or The Diaries of Idi Amin, a merciless parody of the abominable Amin as a sort of bumbling innocent with a taste for explosions of irritability. These would be intolerably politically incorrect now.

As well as being a writer, Coren was a marvellous mentor. Libby Purves said he made her what she is today. I feel the same. My first thought when I heard of Al’s death was: what would my life have been like without him? Only last Wednesday did I say to myself: must ring Al to discuss the book I’m writing about men’s friendships; and I thought, he must be nearly 70, which was an odd thought. I had always used him as a yardstick: at my age, Alan was . . . and now the yardstick has gone.

Coren never believed the pen was mightier than the sword and when pushed he would take direct action. He said at his Punch leaving party that his proudest moment as editor was when he ruptured Miles Kington’s eardrum. Once, allegedly, he hauled off and thumped someone – magnificently, on a gourmet weekend in Torquay – who had, making a conversational point, put a hand on his wife’s knee.

(On occasion he took it as well as dished it out: at a grand party at Cliveden he murmured to Harold Pinter, another working-class Jewish Londoner, “Well, Harold, we’re assimilating, eh?” and Pinter decked him.)

Perhaps what was unique about Al was that while most satirists pose as outsiders, he posed as an insider: Cricklewood man, sharing the aspirations and frustrations of the north London man in the herringbone overcoat. But Alan’s life was rather different: his house in Ranulf Road was a home out of a gracious living magazine; he and his wife owned a Provencal fantasy pavillon in St Paul de Vence; on two occasions I had to stand in for him on The News Quiz on Radio 4, once because he had food poisoning from oysters, the other because he had been summoned to a tête-à-tête dinner with Princess Margaret.

Al’s life was governed by the principle of family honour, known in Yiddish as yiches. He defined it to me in a row about adultery – he declared it not only wrong but also incomprehensible. “I would never have an affair,” he said, “because I wouldn’t want my children to have for their mother the sort of woman who would be married to a man who would cheat on her.”

He could always find the joke, perhaps the most serious and important of skills in an intolerably earnest age. Last winter he e-mailed me in reply to an invitation to say that he had had a dreadful case of necrotising fasciitis. “All I lost was my left armpit,” he wrote. “Got big hole now, perfect for carrying Walther PPK 9mm should Daniel Craig chuck in the sponge. Also got ulcerative colitis, so, director please note, scenes should not be longer than ten secs. But I will cork up for 14/11, if you send embossed stiffie . . . Yours in the ranks of death, A” There’ll be laughter in the ranks now; but less for the rest of us.

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