COMMENT: Well, well. Time flies when you're making fun of the powerful and the mad: 2019 marks the 10th anniversary of the dear old Secret Diary, that weekly appointment with ridicule, travesty, and firmly placing the powerful and mad on whoopee cushions. Ten years of a few laughs, hopefully; 10 years of probably not quite enough nastiness.
It began back in September 2009 with Bill English. Bill who? Every now and then I've wondered about publishing a selection of the Secret Diary in book form but the idea always falls down when I consider its topical and fleeting nature. Satire, like journalism, is concerned with the daily vale of tears of life on Earth, and I barely remember some of the wretches who I've recorded in the Secret Diary.
Who was Sumner Burstyn, who was Louis Crimp, who was Marie Krarup? Who cares anymore about John Key and his head that detached itself from its shoulders and floated mindlessly in the sky, as I recorded in so many, many Secret Diaries?
All political careers end in failure but it's fun to mock them while they last. The purpose of all satire is to incite scorn. It's a noble calling and I take the responsibility with all due respect when I begin a new Secret Diary every Friday morning. I take a deep breath and think: Flay them alive.
University of Sussex scholar Matthew Hodgart wrote a small, excellent study of satire. His 1969 book was called, not especially humorously, Satire. I re-read it at the start of every year and give some thought to what it is that I'm supposed to aim for as a satirist. I'm always astonished and a little disturbed at Hodgart's insistence that satire has to derive from a state of mind which is "critical and aggressive".