The responsibility of being regarded as one of the wittiest men of his generation and the comic guru to the nation could have weighed heavily upon Peter Cook's shoulders, had he been prepared to take anything in life seriously. But the one thing Cook always refused adamantly to do was to take life, himself, or his career seriously.

His was certainly an original talent. It produced an anarchic brand of humour that could be incorrigibly tasteless or simply gloriously absurd and it profoundly influenced subsequent generations of comics and comedy writers.

Having first found fame in the early 1960s alongside three fellow Cambridge University students - Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore - in Beyond the Fringe, a revue in which, for the first time, everyone and everything including the Royal Family and the Prime Minister were targets for ridicule, Cook went on to open The Establishment, A Soho nightclub which avoided censorship by the Lord Chamberlain and which set a new benchmark for social and political satire. He also became the chief shareholder and celebrated Lord Gnome of the satirical magazine Private Eye.

Next came resounding television success with Not Only . . . But Also in which Cook and Dudley Moore created Pete 'n' Dud, a pair of cloth-capped idiots who discussed universal issues of life and philosophy with breathtaking inanity, and captured the hearts and minds of the nation more successfully than perhaps any comic team since the Goons. It was in this series that Cook also created the beloved E.L.Wisty, who hankered to be Royal ("Even if it's the most boring thing in the world, people still say isn't it interesting that a royal person is doing something so boring.")

But while his comic associates went on to explore new avenues and to broaden their careers, Peter Cook's subsequent output was erratic and his activities never quite matched those early successes. From being the most dynamic of the Cambridge four, he came to prefer a life of relative and self-admitted indolence.

Peter Edward Cook was the son of a former Colonial Service official. As a child he stayed for a time with his grandmother while his father served in Nigeria and his mother shuttled between her husband and her children. He was educated at Radley and Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read modern languages with a view to joining the diplomatic corps. He was excused National Service because of hay fever. While still a student he scripted his first stage revue, Pieces of Eight, which was successfully staged at the Apollo Theatre. This was followed by Beyond the Fringe, a series of sketches first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 1960. In May 1961 the revue transferred to London and subsequently became known around the English-speaking world. Cook meanwhile opened, with a friend, The Establishment in Soho. The club format allowed disrespectful references to royalty, senior statesmen, church dignitaries and other "establishment" figures without prior approval from the Lord Chamberlain, then still a censor of the legitimate theatre. Cook showed himself an imaginative impresario, booking such guests as Lenny Bruce.

Cook and Dudley Moore were perfect foils for each other as performers. They appeared in a Royal Variety Performance and in 1965 won the Television Producers' Guild award for light entertainment, thus displaying the British establishment's celebrated readiness to absorb its attackers.

Between 1965 and 1971 they made four series of Not Only . . . But Also. featuring a masterful range of surreal sketches. The six years spent making Not Only . . . But Also were some of the happiest of Peter Cook's life.

His involvement with Private Eye began in 1963 and he eventually owned its Soho offices and four-fifths of the shares. Although his appearances as a performer in later years became sadly infrequent, he never lost a passion for Private Eye, suffering much distress when it incurred huge libel damages. Overall he contributed relatively little in the way of material to the magazine. But he suggested the speech bubble attached to a photograph of a famous person which appeared on the front cover and which became Private Eye's most immediately identifiable characteristic. It was he also who thought up the feature "True Stories" and the hilarious "Mrs Wilson's Diary" which ran throughout the Labour Prime Minister's terms of office.

From the mid-1960s he appeared in more than a score of films, most notably The Wrong Box (1966), Bedazzled (1967), the script of which he wrote himself, Monte Carlo or Bust (1969) and The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970). None was judged first-rate, though his performances were themselves good.

His Mad Hatter in Jonathan Miller's television adaptation of Alice in Wonderland was certainly inspired. Indeed the part might have been made for him. The suspicion began to grow, however, that he was incapable of sustained artistic effort, whether as writer of a single cohesive vehicle or as performer in a major role.

He also made several records and hosted two television series. The records, though essentially lightweight, were commercially successful, his hosting of the television series not even that.

He and Dudley Moore took increasingly differing attitudes to their material. Occasionally this worked. More often it did not. However, their two-man show Behind the Fridge did well in the early 1970s in London, America and Australasia. The pair teamed up again in the early 1980s, releasing a number of albums as Pete 'n' Dud's Dagenham alter egos, the foul-mouthed Derek and Clive. But, except for a brief spell sharing the bill with Dudley Moore on Broadway, Cook had no enthusiasm for working in America.

While Moore developed his career is Hollywood, Alan Bennett became one of the country's most prominent playwrights and Jonathan Miller combined a medical career with another as a theatrical director, Cook remained resolutely unambitious. His undoubted intelligence made him increasingly a misfit in the 1980s world which his own 1960s lampooning had helped to create. It was painfully obvious that his talents were underused, but Cook insisted that this was primarily his own lack of professional drive. "I think I ran out of ambition at 24." he once admitted.

He lived alone in extremely disorderly style in an 18th-century house in Hampstead once owned by H.G.Wells. Apart from an occasional game of golf, his exercise consisted of walking to the newsagent to buy all the Sunday papers, of which he was an obsessional reader. He was also given to telephoning radio phone-in programmes and inventing absurd characters, just for the fun of it. He listed as his favourite pleasures in life: casual chit-chat, reading, sport, radio, television and the newspapers, food, drink and cigarettes and pedantry. Neither writing nor performing was mentioned.

His most recent work was a golfing video, Peter Cook Talks Golf Balls, which was well received when it came out last year. In it Cook played four different characters - an irritating American commentator, a boozy Scottish caddy, a retired major and a crazy German shrink.

By his own admission he was quite disposed to smoke and drink too much and in the last few years had become an overweight and shambolic figure. He was seldom prepared to give anyone a straight answer, but appeared to be living life in a state of relative contentment.

Peter Cook's first wife was Wendy Snowden, whom he met while at university. They married in 1963 and had two daughters. His second marriage, in 1973, was to Judy Huxtable, the former wife of the set-designer Sean Kenny. In 1989 he married Lin Chong, although the couple lived in separate homes 100 yards apart in Hampstead. His daughters also survive him.