TEHRAN -- Muhammad Khorramshahi was a journalist, poet and satirist whose nearly nine decades in the press and on radio made him a living chronicle of Iran’s changing social and cultural life.
With a sharp but humane wit, he turned the hardships and pleasures of ordinary people into laughter, making satire a means of both criticism and consolation.
Khorramshahi was born in 1290 in Douzaj-e Khargan, near Saveh, and died on April 12, 2017, after a life spanning 106 years. His career in journalism extended across generations and publications, from Tofigh and Khorjin to Gol Agha. He adapted his voice to changing audiences while retaining his central concern: the everyday life of ordinary Iranians.
His years at Kayhan became one of the most remarkable chapters of that career. Khorramshahi recalled that Muhammad Safar-Harandi invited him to write poetry for the newspaper and asked whether he could produce one poem a week.
Khorramshahi replied that he wanted to write one every day. When asked whether that was possible, he promised that if a repeated poem ever appeared, he should be fined.
He kept that promise. Sometimes he produced ten or twenty lines a day; sometimes a hundred. On his first day at Kayhan, news arrived of a coup in Ghana. He asked for ten minutes,
went to another room and returned with a poem about the event.
He remained at the newspaper for 15 years. Later, when Safar-Harandi became culture minister, he offered Khorramshahi an advisory position, which he declined. As Khorramshahi put it, he had never pursued money or power.
His satire was rooted particularly in the problems of the middle and lower classes. Housing and the cost of living repeatedly appeared in his poetry.
In “I Am Homeless,” he transformed the ordeal of renting into a long comic lament: endless moves, merciless landlords, cockroaches and rats, rent consuming half a salary, and the constant fear of being forced out once again. Beneath the jokes was an unmistakable record of economic anxiety.
Radio offered another dimension to his work. As a longtime contributor to Sobh-e Jomeh Ba Shoma, he demonstrated that satire could move beyond the printed page and enter people’s homes through rhythm, performance and character. His command of Persian wordplay gave his radio writing a distinctive immediacy.
Khorramshahi also wrote under more than 90 pseudonyms, including Darvish and Gol-Mola, effectively becoming a one-man satirical ensemble.
His poetry could move from everyday complaints to political criticism, as in his “Iwan-e Madaen,” which invoked the ancient arch of Ctesiphon while turning its gaze toward Lebanon, Israel, Chile, Augusto Pinochet and the hardships of contemporary Iran.
His legacy rests in that ability to make laughter carry the weight of reality. Khorramshahi once wrote, “What greater success is there than making people laugh?”
His long career answered the question: for him, laughter was both an art and a way of enduring the bitter days of history.