The Man Who Laughed at the End of the World

He nearly lost his mind at twenty. He saw the camps coming twenty years early. We put him on a mug.

G.K. Chesterton spent the better part of his youth unsure the world outside his own skull was real.

He came out of it the funniest man of his age.

Three hundred pounds in a cape, moving through London with a swordstick, dictating essays on his feet because no chair could hold him. A hundred books. Thousands of columns. He would walk into a debate against …