“Oh,” says my workmate, “really?”
“Yeah. 100 per cent.”
“Okay,” he says.
And then we engage in a robust conversation about the evils of Hamas and their October 7 slaughter, and the retaliation of the IDF and their continued slaughter of Palestinian children.
Yeah, hilarious, exactly the sort of witty repartee you would expect from a veteran satirist at Xmas; one of the ways I make a living is an attempt to be funny, but there is nothing funny, nothing satirical, about the war in Gaza. The conversation I had with another journalist at Xmas would have run along very similar lines to conversations all around New Zealand, all over the world. All of us have seen the pictures, all of us have read the horrifying statistics of death. Headline, December 18: “Palestine health ministry calls for investigation into reports of IDF burying Palestinians alive at Kamal Adwan hospital.” Select journalists and officials have watched a harrowing 44-minute montage of the Hamas attack.
We take sides. We have convictions about what’s right and wrong. We nail our colours to the mast as a matter of conscience. A satirist is no different, but I kept my views about the profound issues of 2023 — war in the Middle East, war in Ukraine — away from the page. The master satirical writer of our age, Private Eye diarist Craig Brown, talked in a recent interview about the complications of having personal feelings.
“I think the nature of parody means you have to half-identify with your subjects — when I write them, half of my brain thinks I really am them, while the other half remains detached,” he said. “If you inject too much spleen, the illusion necessary to parody becomes unbalanced.”
And then he added, “Having said that, I do consider Donald Trump a revolting human being.”
New Zealand, fortunately, lacks a Trump. No one in Parliament is as deranged or dangerous. To satirise our politicians is a pleasant pastime. We don’t operate in a war zone, we don’t kill each other. It’s easy to set aside bias, and concentrate on establishing the illusion necessary to parody, which is to say I research the weekly Secret Diary by reading a lot of cowboy books. Throughout 2023, I returned to the idea of setting the Secret Diary in the wild west — a saloon, a stagecoach, a showdown of some kind.
I wrote of the final weeks of the Ardern regime, “A cold wind blew down the main street of Dodge. It picked up dust, tumbleweeds, and fallen leaves, and swung the FOR SALE signs hanging in front of many of the houses. No one was buying.”
When she left Dodge, I cast Hipkins as the new marshall of Dodge: “Sheriff Chippy put his boots up on his desk, and lit a cheroot. He looked out the window from his office. His deputies, who stood around all day long, followed his gaze. They were thinking about their jobs. An election was coming up ...”
But it never felt convincing to think of him as a sheriff. In the final weeks of his government, I cast him in a new, more pathetic role: “Lonesome Cowboy Chip rode his old tired horse down the main street of Dodge, and shivered. It had been the worst winter following the worst summer. He had begun to forget what sunshine looked like. Worse than that, though, he had begun to forget what company looked like …”
And yet the idea of him as Lonesome Cowboy Chip still wasn’t pathetic enough. During the election, I stopped reading cowboy books, started reading shipwreck books, and cast Hipkins as lost and adrift on the ocean: “Shipwreck Chippy held a meeting with the crew. They huddled beneath a piece of sailcloth tied to four small poles, and shared their provisions — water, chocolate, milk tablets, barley sugar, fish paste and a bottle of lime juice. They had been lost at sea since January. One day Captain Ardern abandoned ship, and the next day it capsized. Several of the crew had been lost at sea. Morale was low. Fresh storms battered the raft. Lashed to six drums, it stayed afloat, but days went by when nothing got done, and many of the crew lay in a torpor…”
Yes, that felt right, that felt accurate. It also foretold the election result, when the blue tide crashed over Shipwreck Chippy’s already pathetic raft, and many political lives were lost.
I came up with other characters during the election — Luxon was a truck driver, Seymour was a space cadet — but the only one that felt as right as Shipwreck Chippy was casting the leader of New Zealand First as The Abominable Peters. With great purpose and resolve, the ancient explorer made his way through the Antarctic wastes, heading for the South Pole … He got there in the end. I was overjoyed. Funnier than Luxon, stranger than Seymour, he will guarantee three years’ worth of satire.
