Why I established Witcraft

The Place Where Not Everything Has To Be Serious

I love humour, wit, absurdity, wry social commentary, and people’s funny moments in their life. I love writers who know how to craft their submissions to reach the audience they crave.

I know there’s a market out there of people who want some daily relief from the gloom and doom that seems to pervade the news and the web. And I know writers who love to write humour.

In despair at being able to find a home for well-crafted humorous work, I decided (with a lot of encouragement from my wife, Sue) to be the change I wanted to see. Hence Witcraft.

So much of what passes for humour, especially on the major US ‘humor’ sites, is infantile, derivative punch-line driven, and consists mostly of put-downs, snark and adolescent obsessions with genitals.

As an Australian, I grew up in the Anglo-Irish tradition of humour, wit and absurdity that didn’t necessarily have a punchline and didn’t always generate belly laughs, but made you smile and make your day more human. Everything from the BBC’s The Goons, Monty Python, My Word, Take It From Here etc, through the inimitable Irishness of Flann O’Brien and Paddy Doyle, and Australian TV shows like The Mavis Bramston Show and The Naked Vicar Show.

This developed into admiration for stand-up comedians who are great storytellers, including Scotland’s Danny Bhoy and Australia’s Kitty Flanagan. They are stand-outs because they are crafters who don’t rely on four-letter words, toilet humour, their ethnic background, their sexuality or any other crutch that says ‘you better laugh at me or everyone will think you’re a racist, misogynist, homophobic etc’. I find it almost impossible to believe that younger audiences still think a comedian saying ‘fuck’ is innately hilarious. (Not that I’m a prude by any means. No, really.)

Since launching Witcraft has received 500 submissions from around the world and published 130 of them. The subject matter has ranged from household appliances to dress codes to creative accounting to giants to the remains of a cake on the roadside and many more. Each brings an individual voice and approach but the feature that unites them is the craft and imagination of the writer.

And I am proud to have given them a home and a readership.