More broadly, by mapping out his progress in the business of foolery – which, as the adored baby of the Kaminsky family, he embarked on while still in diapers – he plots a course of endurance and defiance. He doesn’t make a big deal of the death of his father when he was only two. The book is strong on anecdote, short on analysis or self-criticism.

But that early loss counters the idea that Brooks’s puppyish spirit relates to him just being an eternal kid at heart. “It was a brushstroke of depression that really never left me,” he says. Or, as Kenneth Tynan put it: “All the apprehensions that surface in Brooks’s comedy have the same… source: a fear – or to put it more positively, a hatred – of death.”

Brooks’s uncontentious account of himself suddenly starts to seem less prosaic. Could we do with more heart on sleeve – about the dark times, his drive, his envy, his losses of temper or nerve? Yes. But his resolve to follow the funny, recording the minutiae of what made him crack up and the material that got “big laughs”, isn’t just for the fans, or a study in self-congratulation (buoyed by success though he is). It expresses a need to swing from joke to joke; to “move wild laughter in the throat of death”, as Love’s Labour’s Lost has it.

Some of the later chapters do get a bit awards acceptance speech-y (he includes an encomium by Obama). As you’d expect, the most vivacious material comes from his youth; until nine, when homework dampened the fun, he was in a kind of paradise, poverty notwithstanding. He learnt to wisecrack on the Brooklyn sidewalks: “No bulls— routines. No slick laminated c–p. You really had to be good on your feet”.

I loved the image of the teenage Brooks, chasing laughs in a Catskills resort – springboard for Jewish comics – by sporting a derby and an alpaca coat, lugging two rock-laden cardboard suitcases and, yelling “Business is no good! I don’t wanna live!”, before plunging into the swimming pool. “My suitcases would take me straight to the bottom and my derby would float on the surface. It always got a huge laugh.” Only trouble: he nearly drowned – a lifeguard had to fish him out.