Book: The Sanity Inspector

Overview
Alan Coren's The Sanity Inspector collects his wry, observant columns and comic essays first seen in Punch, offering a sustained satire of everyday British life in the early 1970s. The book is a series of short, sharply observed sketches that turn ordinary moments, family squabbles, encounters with bureaucracy, sporting rituals, into occasions for gently unforgiving comedy. Coren's eye for the absurd and his talent for contraband logic make the commonplace feel oddly theatrical.
The pieces read like conversations with a witty, slightly exasperated friend who delights in exposing the small hypocrisies and rituals that people accept without question. Nothing in the book aims to explode institutions; rather, it dissolves them into laughter through meticulous exaggeration and a steady supply of ironic one-liners.

Content and Themes
The essays repeatedly return to themes of domesticity, middle-class pretensions, and the peculiar rites of English society. Family life is treated as a theater of manners where petty outrages and sentimentalities are pursued with equal gusto. Coren also delights in satirizing language and argument, taking ordinary phrases and stretching them until the logical seams show, revealing the silliness beneath. Sport, food, and the rituals of social status appear often, not as targets of scorn but as reliable material for affectionate mockery.
Underpinning the humor is a gentle moral curiosity about why people behave as they do. Rather than scorning his subjects, Coren punctures pomposity and self-importance, treating small vanities as worthy of attention and ridicule. This lends the book a humane quality: the comedy comes as much from recognition as from derision, so readers see themselves and their acquaintances reflected in the jokes.

Style and Voice
Coren's style is urbane, conversational, and brisk. Sentences often begin with a mild premise that is then carried to a ludicrous but persuasive conclusion. The voice balances self-deprecation with a performance of moral outrage, a combination that keeps the humor lively without tipping into cruelty. Wordplay and mock-logical structures recur, and Coren's timing, his use of cadence and occasional short, loaded sentences, produces frequent laughs on the page rather than relying on set-piece gags.
There is a delightful theatricality to the narration: the writer plays both commentator and participant, slipping into imagined dialogues or staging tiny set-pieces that reveal character through gesture and absurdity. That theatrical sense makes the book read quickly and invites re-reading, as the pleasure often lies as much in how remarks are made as in what they observe.

Legacy and Reception
Upon its release, The Sanity Inspector contributed to Coren's reputation as one of Britain's foremost comic essayists of his generation. The collection illustrated the strengths that would carry him into other media, television, radio, and newspaper columns, where his quick wit and cultivated persona reached a wider audience. Critics and readers who appreciated the particular blend of genial malice and literary polish found much to enjoy.
Decades later, the book remains a useful snapshot of a certain British sensibility and a showcase for Coren's technique: economical premises, escalating absurdity, and an affectionate but incisive eye. For anyone interested in classic Punch humor or in comic essays that turn the small details of life into sustained comedy, The Sanity Inspector still rewards attention.