He had the chance to do it in his book, but he didn't. And it wasn't for "comedic effect". He choose that exact number for a reason, and that particular reason can be found in a certain book written some 2000 years ago. These people know what they are doing.
The joke was that after using the whole planet earth as a computer to calculate the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, which turned out to be 42, they didn't know what the question was. So the answer would remain useless until they could also calculate what the question was.
I, myself, wanted to be a science-fiction writer at a certain point, and I understand pretty well the reason behind these seemingly random symbols.
Once being a wannabe doesn't make you an expert on how people in a field think, and when a field has as wide a variety of creative people as science fiction writing has, it's not even going to be easy for people steeped in the field to understand what's going on in each other's minds. Even among those of us who create Chess variants, we don't all easily understand each other or think the same way.
The joke was that after using the whole planet earth as a computer to calculate the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything, which turned out to be 42, they didn't know what the question was. So the answer would remain useless until they could also calculate what the question was.
Once being a wannabe doesn't make you an expert on how people in a field think, and when a field has as wide a variety of creative people as science fiction writing has, it's not even going to be easy for people steeped in the field to understand what's going on in each other's minds. Even among those of us who create Chess variants, we don't all easily understand each other or think the same way.