OPINION:
You would have to think that 2020 was the unfunniest year ever, that nothing about it was the best of times and everything about it was the worst of times, that it threatened a plague on all our houses, that it chased us indoors and cost the livelihoods of many and the actual lives of 25 New Zealanders, that the financial worst is yet to come – but as a weekly satirist operating in a kind of banana republic where nothing much ever happens, I look back on the virus with some fondness. New Zealand exists as a place of laughter in the light. Here, finally, was an opportunity for laughter in the dark.
Covid gave an edge to the practice of satire. I've been writing the Secret Diary for 11 years and 2020 was probably the year I've most enjoyed doing it. True, when lockdown approached and Dr Ashley Bloomfield first loomed large, I was really scared. The virus was a tyranny. I felt it like a hand around my throat. I took it very seriously indeed and yet I couldn't wait to write the Secret Diary every Friday.
Things went so crazy, so fast; amid fears that food supplies would run out, I wrote a Secret Diary of the Kiwi householder, "At the end of the day it's a time to show national pride and right now we've got to show that no one in the world panics as quickly and strips supermarket shelves bare of toilet paper as swiftly as we do."
A satirist's duty is to mock sacred cows. The most sacred of all cows in public life in New Zealand in 2020 was lockdown level 4, and so I wrote its Secret Diary: "Go home. Stay home. Barricade yourself in. Lock the door. Close the curtains. Stay away from the window. Stay away from the back door too. Disconnect the telephone line. Relax baby and draw that blind – no, wait, that's the lyrics from the Rod Stewart song Tonight's the Night.
Tonight is not the night. Sex is permitted but police have the authority to make random stops and can and will pull you over, so to speak."