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Satirist, writer, humorist, broadcaster, and Sage of Cricklewood, Alan Coren died of lung cancer on Thursday (October 18th). To say he was brilliantly funny is somewhat of an understatement, and doesn’t do him justice. He was brilliant and brilliantly funny–a master wordsmith with an incredible sense of humor, and masterful humorist with an extraordinary talent for prose. The distinction being that you could remove his facility for either writing or humor and still be left with a brilliant man.

While he primarily made his living through the written word, to me, his genius shone brightest on The News Quiz, where the spontaneous nature of his wit was most evident. He had a seemingly endless capacity for identifying news items, no matter how small, and an even greater aptitude for making mundane stories entertaining. The most banal article could spark his imagination and would beget a flight of fancy that took you along with him. You might have no idea where you’d end up (neither did he), but you could rest assured it would be a wonderful, chortle-filled journey through absurdity that ended in a big laugh.

The same capricious and absurd nature filled his writing, though due to the nature of the medium it lacked the edge of his quick wit. He could somehow squeeze out several hundred hilarious words on the subject of what he had for lunch, and while the humor was fanciful, the construction of the story was the work of a meticulous, master grammarian and writer who could construct thoughts so well you’d reread a sentence just to fully appreciate how well crafted it was.

Alan Coren was one of my favorite people and will be sorely missed. If you feel the same and would like to pay tribute to him, petition the OED to include “peripolitan” in his honor.