What makes you feel nostalgic?

To Hoom Whom it May Konsurn,

Hi VNR. I’m Kyadi Kayden i am siks yers uld and I thinck Jedeye are rilly cool. Yes. And bek becawz on Tuzday my teechr luvs som vide moovys on teh compootre. Yes! So she sed i rite too mi heeroz, teh beste satirkul nooz I luv to reed all wayz and my mom tellz mi teechr that the VNR iz jest theee besst abowt. What maks yoo hav nutsalja feelng?

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Dear Kayden,

What an excellent letter from one of our biggest fans, and from a six year old too! We couldn’t have made this up if we tried.

Y’know Kayden, it reminds me of when I first started writing satire. I was about your age, 4 if I’m being honest, when I wrote my first satirical article about the US and Allied Forces dropping bombs on the Axis powers in the North African theater. But Kayden, here’s the funny part. Those bombs that I said the Allied Forces dropped? Oh man, get this. I said they were full of, Farts!!! Hahaha!! Get it? Like, who drops farts in war?!? Oh man. A classic joke from the mind of a four year old… fart bombs! What a riot!

I laughed for the next 6 years. Then. I got serious about satire, and I haven’t laughed since.

Once I realized the satirically investigative news business was a cut-throat racket–where the difference between success and failure was who had more novelty joy buzzers sent to the right connections in DC and Hollywood–is when it hit me that satire is the battlefield to hell, kid. You get in it for the laughs, but stay for the scars.

Now? I’m a grizzled, industry veteran. I chew candy cigars for breakfast and wash them down with gasoline. When I demand an article from my staff, I know at least 3 people will be killed in the process, and because it’s the satire industry, kid, at least one of those poor mooks will die by a rubber chicken. At least half the people we “laugh out” aren’t even recognizable to the police because we put those big mustache with fake nose disguises on the bodies. Cops never got wise to it. 🥸. I own judges and politicians with all the satire I invented on them. Every night I eat Pepto Bismol for dinner and follow it with a bucket of nails. I’ll be fifteen tomorrow. It’s been a good life, and I earned every scar and every chortle.

So you ask me, what makes me nostalgic, me, the owner of the greatest satirically investigative news source in a nearby galaxy and right here in lower Temecula? The same guy that has reporters at The Onion tailed, then seduced by honeypots, just so we can replace their pens with disappearing ink and get hidden speakers into their boardrooms–not so I can listen but so I can make well-timed fart noises while they’re talking? What makes me nostalgic?

It’s simple, kid. It’s the little things:

1. To crush my enemies
2. To see them driven before me
3. To hear the lamentation of their court jesters

That’s it kid. That’s what takes me back to simpler times. But, I gotta run. Some of my prisoners from The Onion News Network need to get tortured. Y’know how to torture a satirist, kid? Read The Babylon Bee to them. I’ve broken more comedians that way then with knock-knock jokes.

Good luck kid, no offense but I hope I never see you in the satire biz. Then I’ll know you made it, you made something of yourself.

Godspeed Kayden.