Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson and chair of judges Andrew Motion talk to Andrew Dickson after the result is announced guardian.co.uk

Howard Jacobson's laugh-out-loud exploration of Jewishness, The Finkler Question, last night became the first unashamedly comic novel to win the Man Booker prize in its 42-year history.

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 Booker prize chairman, Sir Andrew Motion, said it was "quite amazing" that this was the first time Jacobson had been shortlisted. But he was not, in any way, being rewarded because it was his turn.

"It never came into our minds," he said. "Having said that, there is a particular pleasure in seeing somebody who is that good finally getting his just deserts."

Jacobson admitted he had waited a long time and, yes, there had been bitterness. "I have been wanting to win the Booker prize from the start. I don't think I'm alone in that, it's such a fantastic prize. It was beginning to look like I was the novelist that never ever won the Booker prize.

"I have been increasingly talked about as underrated and I'm so sick of being described as the underrated Howard Jacobson. So the thought that's gone forever, is wonderful."

Jacobson claimed he was going to spend his £50,000 prize money on a handbag for his wife. "Have you seen the price of handbags?"

Motion said the decision was simple. "It won because it was the best book. You expect a book by Howard Jacobson to be very clever and very funny and it is both those things. But it is also, in a very interesting way, a very sad, melancholic book. 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. It was "absolutely a book for grownups, for people who understand that comedy and tragedy are linked".

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. "There is a fear of comedy in the novel today," he wrote. "When did you last see the word 'funny' on the jacket of a serious novel?"

Motion said times were changing and while he would go to music gigs when young, his children now go to comedy gigs. "The place of comedy in society has changed – so maybe we are more accommodating of it than we have ever been in the past.

However, The Finkler Question should not, he said, be seen as something that was "relentlessly middle-brow, or easy-peasy" because it was comic. "It is much cleverer and more complicated and about much more difficult things than it immediately lets you know. Several people have used the word wise, and that's a good word."

The book – Jacobson's 11th – follows the lives of three friends, Julian Treslove, Sam Finkler and Libor Sevick, and tackles not just what it is to be a British Jew, but also the nature of friendship itself.

Published by Bloomsbury, it beat a strong field including a novel that had unexpectedly become odds-on favourite with the bookmakers. Ladbrokes even stopped taking bets last week because of the betting patterns surrounding Tom McCarthy's C.

The others which missed out were Emma Donoghue's Room, Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room, Andrea Levy's The Long Song and Peter Carey's Olivier and Parrot in America. Victory for Carey would have made him the only three-time winner and hopes had been high, with the Australian novelist believing it his best work and Motion praising him as a modern-day Dickens. Jacobson, meanwhile, has described himself as "a Jewish Jane Austen" but only, he said last night, because he was sick of others calling him the "English Philip Roth". He added: "People think I'm steeped in the American Jewish novel. I'm not. I've read them. I admire them. But I'm steeped in English lit, my favourite writer is Dr Johnson, my favourite comic writer is Dickens."

Jacobson's victory means he is the oldest winner since William Golding won in 1980, aged 69, for Rites of Passage.

The judges were much brisker than in previous years in taking just an hour to agree Jacobson should win, with a 3-2 split. "It was a pretty intense hour. It wasn't unanimous but it was a decision that everybody is entirely happy with," said Motion.

He declined to say which side he was on or which book just missed out: "I don't want that person to go to bed tonight and eat their pillow."

The judges, who this year also included dancer Deborah Bull, journalist Rosie Blau, broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe and writer Frances Wilson, read more than 140 novels before discarding books by big hitters including Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.

There was controversy when the longlist came out because it included Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, which chronicled the lives of often unpleasant and misogynistic suburban Australians. The Booker judges contended that he was writing about misogynists rather than it being a misogynistic novel.

The victory will mean a sharp spike in sales but Jacobson admitted it might also affect his next book. "I was well into an extremely comic book with no sadness in it – it was looking like one of the funniest things I'd ever done - about a writer enjoying no success whatsoever. I'm in a bit of schtuck with this one."

• This article was amended on 13 October 2010. The original referred to Christian Tsiolkas. This has been corrected.