This is Craig Brown by Craig Brown

5 years as a one-man humour factory is no joke for Craig

There's something disheartening about bumper collections of humorous prose, as though the UN has declared an International Year of the Joke, or Bernard Manning has turned up in your sitting room to perform in person. Craig Brown's collection is more bumper than most and carries the added gravitas of 14 superlative commendations ("greatest satirist", "funniest journalist") by such heavyweight wits as Stephen Fry, Julie Burchill and Harry Enfield.

He's not the funniest journalist, not while Nancy Banks-Smith, in her TV column, turns out such lines as "He has a face so innocent you could eat your breakfast off it". Brown rarely chimes with such felicitous incongruity, which is not to say he's not funny. A man who looks like Auberon Waugh crossed with Max Wall has got to be funny.

Brown practices a more workaday sort of humour. He's an engineer rather than a magician, his speciality the ingenious premise. He describes a Turner prize dinner that consists of nothing, maps out the extraordinary affinities of Harold Pinter and Margaret Thatcher and conjures the marvellous Society of Pedants, which spends long meetings splitting hairs (though never infinitives).

He has a special affection for pedants, as for bullshitters, wafflers, solipsists, banal bores and the Amisly obsessed (respectively: conceptual art critics, politicians, celebrities, DJs and Martin Amis). When not quoting them, he evokes them in skilful parodies. He is exceptional in his restrained use of the sneer. Except in the cases of Sarah Kent, Mohamed al-Fayed and Edward de Bono, whom he appears to loathe, there is affection in his character assassinations.

He's good at language, its pronunciations and etymology. He's a trivia magpie, trawling for gems in sources from Who's Who to celebrity photographs pinned to restaurant walls. Sometimes he's surprisingly serious. In a comic piece about the need to preserve the British stiff upper lip (at the time of Diana's death), he writes movingly about bereavement. My favourite chapter, Heroes, contains no jokes by Brown, but eulogies of Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Auberon Waugh ("he had the prose equivalent of perfect pitch") and Edward Lear, among others, illuminated by insight into the nature of humour and personal anecdote.

If Brown isn't the funniest humorist in the country, he is certainly the most prolific, writing an average of one piece a day, for several publications. However, it's impossible to be funny for 600 to 1,000 words every day. The strain shows, even in this collection, which would be improved by a 200-page cut.

Too often, having set up his joke cow at the start, Brown milks it to death, apparently unaware of diminishing returns. In one dreary piece about everyone having colds, he talks about parents at a school's Christmas concert singing "Cough All Ye Faithful", "Loud Night" and "Bark the Herald Angels". I might have allowed "Bark the Herald Angels".

Brown started writing 25 years ago, when there was very little humour in newspapers. Now there's a lot, mostly written by him. Perhaps a little less success is exactly the medicine he needs.