What he created was an awareness that when the writer’s mind works by free association it can ricochet from the normal to the absurd and, by the unexpectedness of its angle, demolish whatever trite idea had been there before. Onto this element of constant surprise he grafted the dazzling wordplay that was his trademark, a rich and recondite vocabulary, and an erudition based on reading and travel. But even that mixture wouldn’t have sustained him if he hadn’t had a target. “All humor must be about something—it must touch concretely on life,”
