Mark Boxer once drew a caricature of Richard Ingrams dressed up as a schoolboy, wearing a tiny cap, sitting down with his hands lodged awkwardly between his legs, his mouth set in one of those upside-down smiles, like an upturned U, and a steely, unforgiving look in his eyes.
‘Caricature is a serious thing,’ wrote one of Ingrams’s favourite authors, G K Chesterton. ‘It is almost blasphemously serious. Caricature really means making a pig more like a pig than even God made him.’
Mark Boxer’s caricature seriously accentuates some of the key components of Ingrams’s character: his intransigence, his priggishness and what his enemies invariably term his ‘schoolboy’ sense of humour, though this, in my experience, is a term employed only by those for whom all humour is a mystery.
It is his sense of humour that defines him. Every year before COVID struck, put on a show at the
