Edward Koren, the New Yorker cartoonist who created a fantasy world of toothy, long-nosed, hairy creatures of indeterminate species that articulated the neuroses and banalities of middle-class America for six decades, died on Friday at his home in Brookfield, Vt. He was 87.

His wife, Curtis Koren, said the cause was lung cancer.

In the gentle, affable kingdom of Koren, the beasts form a polite queue in the woods at a 24-hour banking A.T.M. attached to a tree. They line up to board Noah’s Ark, but must pass through security-gate metal detectors. And as smiling cockroaches, they cluster like tourists with a city skyline in the backdrop. One takes a group selfie.

With Charles Addams, James Thurber and Saul Steinberg, Mr. Koren was one of the most popular cartoonists in The New Yorker’s long love affair with humor. To connoisseurs, his bristling pen-and-ink characters, with or without captions, were instantly recognizable — nonconfrontational humans and a blend of fanged crocodile and antlered reindeer who poked fun at a society preoccupied with fitness fads (bike-riding), electronic gadgets (cellphones) and pop psychology.

In a bed for three, a grimacing psychiatrist squeezed between battling spouses takes “couples therapy” notes.

Wife to husband amid a debris of smashed furniture: “I think it’s wonderful to be so direct with your anger.”

Two bohemian couples enjoying drinks in a book-lined living room. Looming over them is the elephantine resident beast. “We deal with it by talking about it,” the hostess confides.

The only child of a New York dentist and a teacher who subscribed to Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, Mr. Koren studied art in New York and Paris, struggled for years to create a unique style, and found it hiding in plain sight: the subtle humor of life’s contradictions.

He published his first New Yorker cartoon in 1962. It depicted a struggling writer in a “Shakespeare” sweatshirt, puzzling over his typewriter.

In a career that seemed oblivious to the wars, racial strife and calamities that bloodied the rapiers of more combative cartoonists, Mr. Koren forged his mythic realm of benign beasts and humans with snouts in some 1,100 cartoons for The New Yorker, including dozens of covers, and many more for The Nation, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair and other publications.

“My trajectory was a comedy of manners,” Mr. Koren said in an interview for this obituary in 2018. “I was drawn to sociology and cultural anthropology. My work was a bit tame, I suppose. I avoided sex. It was political in a different sense. I examined the middle class, and everywhere I looked people were outraged. I did not want to manifest that in my work. I just gravitated toward animals.”

Elaborating on his anthropomorphic creatures, Mr. Koren said: “Animals are gentle and funny. There is a long tradition in English and French literature, going back to the 19th century, of using animals in humor. For me, it was a framework, a way of getting above the political fray and the passing controversies of the day.”

“Woody Allen’s world is Tolstoyan by comparison,” Ken Johnson wrote in a Times review of a Koren retrospective at Columbia University in 2010. “Within his comfort zone, though, Mr. Koren can be funny, psychologically acute and philosophically provocative. He has a pitch-perfect feel for gag lines, and with his scribbly draftsmanship has forged one of the most distinctive styles in cartooning.”

Mr. Koren also drew some frankly commercial, if slyly humorous, cartoons for private clients — vineyards, banks, clothiers, mutual funds, university course catalogs and credit cards.

A restaurant waiter in a bow tie takes dinner orders from two seated American Express cards.

A holiday reindeer with two toddler-beasties winds up a jeweled music-box at Hermès (Paris).

“Out of the unkempt hair styles and ragamuffin dress of the sixties, Mr. Koren has distilled a marvelously ironic comedy of manners,” the Times art critic Hilton Kramer wrote in 1975 about an album of New Yorker cartoons. “His hairy creatures, with their smirky animal faces and sloppy social vanities, add something genuinely new to The New Yorker’s chronicle of wayward sociability.”