A witty wisecracking wag once remarked that Churchill had devoted the best years of his life to his impromptu speeches. Something similar was mentioned, in retrospect albeit, about Mr Abraham, who, to colleagues was known variedly as Abe, Brother Abe, Father Abe and then latterly and in private, Monster Abe.
By that time - the end, when one hysteric colleague was prompted to leave a rude placard on Abe's desk reading "Support bacteria, they're the only culture some people have" by that time, nearly everybody had worked out his system, his routine, his repertoire.
But in the beginning - from that very first interview, when he set foot in the company as a fledgling fresh-faced hand, new out of university - he even managed to fool two-thirds of the interview panel. Humour, not speechmaking, was Mr Abraham's forté.
To his credit, he possessed an inherent ability to hold an audience in thrall while he worked a joke he was telling to a crescendo.
And he polished that ability with untiring diligence, researching, never repeating and maintaining the straightest of faces while the others about him mopped their eyes with company-supplied tissue.
If he did repeat a joke - rarely - it was never to the same audience for he kept a canny joke-telling ledger of what he said, and where.
He knew, for instance, that he'd told the joke about The Elliots and the Dentist to the interview panel and then, four years later, when the panellists had all retired.
A mild one by Abe's standards, it consisted of Mr and Mrs Elliot visiting the dentist where Mr Elliot, confronted by the dentist, insists they're in a hurry so he wants no fancy stuff, no needles, no anaesthesia or stuff, just get on with it pull the tooth.
The overawed dentist praises Mr Elliot, wishing out loudly that there were more patients like him and asking, "Which tooth?" Whereupon Mr. Elliot turns to his wife and orders, "Show him, honey!"
Mildly funny, indeed, but given Mr Abraham's skills - and the jokes got better and funnier - it should surprise nobody that his happy knack of keeping everybody else laughing should have got noticed at the very highest levels.
The Power of Comedy, to stir a bunch of workers during a dull day at the office, was saluted and Mr Abraham was anointed the office's prince of laughter.
Laughed
In this way, while they all laughed belly-achingly, no one noticed minor disagreements that, like many-fissured cracks in the cement, widened and deepened with time.
Blinded by their own tears of merriment, hardly anyone noticed, too, the consistent arc of ascendancy that Mr Abraham's own career was achieving until, one final day, he slipped out of his little desk in the office pool and moved further up the shag-pile corridor into a spacious tinted glass office.
Using comedy as a pogo stick he leapfrogged the shoulders of several senior colleagues and was to be seen in the succeeding years, reclined in a swivel leather arm chair, polished boots thrown casually on the desktop, a telephone clamped to one ear while he told a joke down the swinging line, selling humour to a distant advertiser, or sponsor.
In a red file, locked in his safe, he scored through, from time to time, a name on a personal "hit list" , until, too late, somebody in the echelons above him realised that nearly every senior, experienced hand in the company had been shown the door.
Mr Abraham, with his Power of Comedy, had managed to infuse the office with his own team of greenhorns having dusted out what he termed were the clinging corporate cobwebs.
Too late, too, the powers-that-be realised that the ever-alert competitors had snapped up the experienced hands.
This was when Abe in his incarnation as "the monster" was acknowledged. This was also when the Power of Comedy era gave way to several bleak and unfulfilled years that were openly referred to as The Comedy of Power.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
