Motion said times were changing and while he would go to music gigs when young, his children now go to comedy gigs. 'When did you last see the word 'funny' on the jacket of a serious novel?' 'There is a fear of comedy in the novel today,' he wrote. It will be a sweet victory for the Manchester-born Jacobson, who lamented the fact that comic fiction was not taken more seriously in the Guardian Saturday Review last weekend. It was 'absolutely a book for grownups, for people who understand that comedy and tragedy are linked'.

It is comic, it is laughter, but it is laughter in the dark.' Motion agreed it is a comic novel but said it was much more. But it is also, in a very interesting way, a very sad, melancholic book. You expect a book by Howard Jacobson to be very clever and very funny and it is both those things. Jacobson claimed he was going to spend his £50,000 prize money on a handbag for his wife. So the thought that's gone forever, is wonderful.' 'I have been increasingly talked about as underrated and I'm so sick of being described as the underrated Howard Jacobson. It was beginning to look like I was the novelist that never ever won the Booker prize. I don't think I'm alone in that, it's such a fantastic prize. 'I have been wanting to win the Booker prize from the start. Jacobson admitted he had waited a long time and, yes, there had been bitterness. 'Having said that, there is a particular pleasure in seeing somebody who is that good finally getting his just deserts.' But he was not, in any way, being rewarded because it was his turn. The Booker prize chairman, Sir Andrew Motion, said it was 'quite amazing' that this was the first time Jacobson had been shortlisted.

There will be cries of 'about time too' for a funny and warm writer, now 68, who has long been highly regarded but unrewarded with major literary prizes.

The finkler question