After a life noted both for its brilliance and its ironies, satire died on May 9, 2018. An autopsy will be performed, but experts point to a statement by new NRA President Oliver North that urged President Trump to punish anyone who does business with Iran as the definitive cause of death.





To be sure, this was only the final blow, the final nail in the inevitable coffin. Reports of its previous death were, in fact, exaggerated. Satire’s biographers note that its long, slow decline into infirmity was likely begun when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 after being the architect behind the killing of at least a million people in the five years prior. That prompted the great Harvard math professor and song parodist Tom Lehrer to reportedly, though probably apocryphally, declare that satire was officially dead.

Nonetheless, satire lived on, though in a severely weakened state, for another 45 years. It endured many other ailments over the years, including millions of American Christians who fervently called themselves “pro-life” nonetheless cheerleading for every war the American government could dream up. That, on top of the spectacle of people who claimed to follow Jesus clamoring for cuts to health care, food and housing could easily have killed satire before now, but it proved resilient.

The dawning of the Trump era seems to have made the end of satire inevitable. The sight of “pro-family” groups declaring their undying loyalty to a thrice-married adulterer who paid off porn stars to cover up his affairs depleted satire of its precious bodily fluids, leaving it weak and unable to recover from this final blow from Oliver North.

Loved ones could only watch in horror as the disgraced former military officer who violated previous sanctions on Iran to sell them thousands of TOW missiles and other weapons, the profits of which were then used to illegally fund the Contras in Nicaragua, opined that Trump should punish companies who do business with that country under a legal multi-national agreement put satire into a brief coma from which it never recovered.

Satire leaves behind one son, named Poe, who respectfully requests that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Andy Borowitz so he can continue to live in the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. Services will be held on Saturday on the stage set of Saturday Night Live.