Published: 17 August 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The Canadian-born writer has been writing the Modern Guru column in Good Weekend for 20 years. He talks to Anne Susskind about fan mail, why he hates jokes and why Australia is so strange
FORGET DECORUM: it is only when you “forcefully remove your filters” that comedy can pop out, says writer and humourist Danny Katz, whose Modern Guru column has been appearing in the front of the Good Weekend magazine for 20 years.
A spoof on an agony aunt column, Modern Guru mostly considers questions of modern etiquette, such as Should I have slopped sunscreen on a struggling stranger? Should you pay extra to share your Netflix login with your grasping in-laws? What to do in the face of deafening music on the beach? and What’s the right date to change over into my winter pjs?
The questions, which I’d always presumed were concocted by Katz, are genuine and he receives between 15 and 30 a week. “Oh my God, that’s brutal”, he says, when he hears of my presumption, adding that “people are nuts. That’s a good thing.”
The letters he’d really like to explore are those he often can’t because they are, as his editor tells him, too low rent - people with weird sexual problems or genuinely scary relationship issues or suicidal thoughts. “You think, ‘Jesus, do you even know what I do?’ I’m an idiot writing an idiot column posing as a wise man.’
“I once received a beautiful letter from a 16-year-old who was having dark thoughts, and wrote back with suggestions of people to talk to; proper ‘non-idiot’ counsellors.
“I do try impart some feeble wisdom and actually try answer them but I have no insight into other humans. Sometimes you think, ‘well, there could be a weird way of solving this problem that’s slightly left field, a bit funny. But it actually could be a solution’.”
Katz is certainly funny in person and also funny on the page, a rare talent he has been delivering on, consistently, for 25 years across the Fairfax mastheads (Until recently he also wrote a weekly column for the Age). He has a dry, often deadpan tone, an easy familiarity and is a great observer with an eye for the ridiculous. Katz hates proper jokes (the kind with punchlines), perhaps because he’s not good at them. He doesn’t have the timing, he says.
