Irwin Corey

NEW YORK — Irwin Corey, the wild-haired comedian and actor known for his improvisational riffs and nonsensical style who billed himself as “The World’s Foremost Authority,” died Monday at his home in Manhattan, according to his son, Richard. He was 102.

Corey’s dizzying mix of mock-intellectual circumlocutions, earnest political tirades and slapstick one-liners made Corey the king of comedic confusion and earned him the nickname “professor.”

“Did you hear about the guy who went to the druggist and wanted to get some cyanide?” one of his jokes went. “The guy takes a picture of his wife out of his wallet, and the druggist says, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had a prescription!’”

Corey became a staple on television talk shows and in comedy clubs, and his film career included working with Jackie Gleason and Woody Allen.

It was never clear exactly what he was an authority on. Often he would begin his act with long-winded gobbledygook filled with sentences that followed their own logic before pausing and then saying, “What was the question again?”

His son called his father “original and one-of-a-kind, iconic.”

Corey was among a generation of comics who emerged in the 1950s and ’60s who used their humor to question the status quo, a group that included Dick Gregory, who mocked racial attitudes, and Jerry Stiller and his wife, Anne Meara, who satirized assumptions about marriage. Corey punctured academic pretense, and his jokes also took on a political and social bite.