By Ann Oldenburg and Maria Puente

USA TODAY

St. Peter must be wondering what's all that racket at the Pearly Gates now that Tom Magliozzi has pulled up in a ramshackle old Chevy, laughing uproariously and shouting, "Don't drive like my brother!"

The older half of the beloved National Public Radio show Car Talk's "Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers," is gone, meaning no one else is likely to make yakking and yucking it up about cars — cars, for Pete's sake! — a laugh-a-minute riot ever again, even to people who couldn't care less about cars.

"Click has lost his Clack," tweet-mourned Arnie Seipel of NPR.

"Who knew carburetors could be so funny?" tweeted David Corn, Washington editor of Mother Jones.

So it went all afternoon Monday as the worlds of cars, comics and radio reacted to the passing of Magliozzi, who died of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 77.

In a statement announcing his brother's death, brother Ray alluded to a familiar joke about the weekly puzzlers they always featured in the show.

"Turns out he wasn't kidding. He really couldn't remember last week's puzzler," Ray said. "We can be happy that he lived the life he wanted to live; goofing off a lot, talking to you guys every week and primarily laughing his ass off."

That could be his brother's epitaph: The one thing fans know most defined Tom was his infectious laugh.

Tom and Ray made Car Talk a weekly must-hear show, turning their advice about car troubles into entertaining radio with their jokes and brotherly bantering, with each other and with their call-in guests. Many people called as much to talk to them as to find out what was wrong with their cars.

The show, one of NPR's most popular, began as a radio show on WBUR in Boston decades ago, back when more people actually fixed their own cars. The brothers took calls, answered questions, offered their brain-teasing math "puzzlers" and generally goofed off.

"When we first started doing the show, it was mainly to attract customers to (our) garage," Ray told USA TODAY in an interview in 2008. "We saw that as a vehicle, no pun intended, to get people to know who we were."

Tom said they couldn't mention the name of the garage or where it was. "So we came up with the idea of the puzzler, and we told people to send their answers to the garage, at this address, and repeated it several times."

Cue the loud laugh. And a booming business: The show went national in 1987, and the brothers ended up with something of a media empire that included books, a syndicated newspaper column, a website and TV stints.

Tom was 12 years older than Ray. They grew up in a tough neighborhood of East Cambridge, Mass., in a close-knit Italian family. On the show, they came off as funny, regular-guy mechanics, but both graduated from MIT.

In addition to the radio show, the brothers appeared in the 2006 Pixar film, Cars. In 2008, the brothers starred in their own PBS animated series, Click and Clack's As the Wrench Turns, playing fictionalized versions of themselves.

Tom was the first in his family to attend college. He got a degree in chemical engineering, but he was never that enthralled by work, particularly the 9-to-5 world.

"He actually hated working in any world," Ray said in an NPR blog post. "Later on, when we were doing Car Talk, he would come in late and leave early. We used to warn him that if he left work any earlier, he'd pass himself coming in."

Tom once described his own attitude to his listeners: "Don't be afraid of work. Make work afraid of you. I did such a fabulous job of making work afraid of me that it has avoided me my whole life so far."

Before Car Talk, he "worked" as a Harvard Square bum, a house painter, an inventor and an auto mechanic. But Car Talk allowed him to do what he loved most, Ray said: "Making friends, philosophizing, thinking out loud, solving people's problems and laughing his butt off."

NPR's Susan Stamberg paid tribute to Tom in a New Hampshire Public Radio blog post, saying, "Funny and smart and big-hearted, Tom was as warm in real life as he was on the radio."

Car Talk ran from 1987 to 2012. It remains a top-rated show on NPR stations where it plays in syndication.

Tom is survived by his first wife, Julia; second wife, Joanne; his children, Lydia Icke, Alex and Anna Magliozzi; five grandchildren; and his close companion of recent years, Sylvia Soderberg.

In a note on the NPR site, Ray asked, "In lieu of flowers or rotten fish, I know my brother would prefer folks made a donation to their favorite public radio station in his memory."

Contributing: Gary Levin