Paul Krassner

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Paul Krassner (born April 9, 1932) was the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. With the radical humor of his publication shattering taboos and breaking barriers, Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s.

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[edit] Achievements

Krassner was a child violin prodigy (and was the youngest person ever to play Carnegie Hall, in 1939 at age six),[1] but his career took a different turn in the 1950s with his politically edged humor and satire. Krassner was a founder of the Youth International Party (Yippies) in 1967 and a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, famous for prankster activism. He was a close protege of the controversial comedian Lenny Bruce, and the editor of Bruce's autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.[2] With the encouragement of Bruce, Krassner started to perform as a standup comedian in 1961, at the Village Gate in New York.[2]

In 1963, he created what Kurt Vonnegut described as "miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein's e=mc2." Vonnegut explained: "With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM. At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. [...] By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn't merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm."[3][4]

In 1971, five years after Lenny Bruce death, Groucho Marx said, "I predict that in time Paul Krassner will wind up as the only live Lenny Bruce."[2]

He also worked on early issues of Mad.

[edit] The Realist

Main articles: The Realist and The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book

The Realist was published on a fairly regular schedule during the 1960s, then on an irregular schedule after the early 1970s. In 1966, Krassner published The Realist's controversial "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" poster, illustrated by Wally Wood, and he recently made this famed black-and-white poster available in a digital color version. The Realist also distributed a red, white and blue Cold War bumper sticker that read "Fuck Communism."

Krassner's most notorious satire was the article following the censorship of William Manchester's book on the Kennedy assassination: The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book. At the climax of the grotesque-genre short-story, Lyndon B. Johnson is penetrating the bullet-hole wound in JFK's corpse throat.[5] According to Elliot Feldman, "Some members of the mainstream press and other Washington political wonks, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, actually believed this incident to be true."[6] In a 1995 interview for the magazine Adbusters, Krassner commented: "People across the country believed - if only for a moment - that an act of presidential necrophilia had taken place. It worked because Jackie Kennedy had created so much curiosity by censoring the book she authorized - William Manchester's, "The Death Of A President" - because what I wrote was a metaphorical truth about LBJ's personality presented in a literary context, and because the imagery was so shocking, it broke through the notion that the war in Vietnam was being conducted by sane men.".[7]

In 1966, he reprinted in the Realist, an excerpt from the academic journal the Journal of the American Medical Association, but presenting it as original material. The article dealt with drinking glasses, tennis balls and other foreign bodies found in patients’ rectums.[8] Some accused him of having a perverted mind, and a subscriber wrote "I found the article thoroughly repellent. I trust you know what you can do with your magazine."[8]

Krassner revived this publication as a much smaller newsletter during the mid-1980s when material from the magazine was collected in The Best of the Realist: The 60's Most Outrageously Irreverent Magazine (Running Press, 1985). The final issue of The Realist was #146 (Spring, 2001).

[edit] Books

Krassner remains a prolific writer. In 1971 he published a collection of his favourite works for the Realist, as How A Satirical Editor Became A Yippie Conspirator In Ten Easy Years[9]. In 1981 he published the satirical story Tales of Tongue Fu, in which the hilarious misadventures of the Japanese-American man Tongue Fu are mixed with a wicked social commentary. In 1994 he published his autobiography Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in Counter-Culture.

He published three collections of drug stories. The first collection, Pot Stories for the Soul (1999), is from other authors and is about marijuana. Psychedelic Trips for the Mind (2001), his written by Krassner himself and collects stories on LSD. The third, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs (2004), his by Krassner too, and deals with magic mushrooms, ecstasy, peyote, mescaline, THC, opium, cocaine, ayahuasca, belladonna, ketamine, PCP, STP, "toad slime," and more.

[edit] Other activities

Krassner also remains a prolific lecturer. Currently, he is a columnist for The Nation, AVN Online and High Times Magazine. He also is a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post. He was featured at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with Wavy Gravy during their exhibit entitled I Want to Take You Higher: The Psychedelic Era 1965-1969 [10]. He often appears as a stand-up comedian, and he was among those featured in the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats.

[edit] Awards

Krassner is the only person to win awards from both Playboy magazine (for satire) and the Feminist Party Media Workshop (for journalism). He was inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, received an ACLU Uppie (Upton Sinclair) Award for dedication to freedom of expression, and, according to the FBI files, was described by the FBI as "a raving, unconfined nut."[11][2] George Carlin commented: "The FBI was right, this man is dangerous--and funny; and necessary."[2] In 2005 he received a Grammy nomination for Best Album Notes for his essay on the 6-CD package Lenny Bruce: Let the Buyer Beware.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books

  • 1981 - Tales of Tongue Fu (And/Or Press)
  • 1994 - Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture (Touchstone) ISBN 0-671-89843-4
  • 2000 - Sex, Drugs, and the Twinkie Murders (Loompanics Unlimited) ISBN 1-55950-206-1
  • 2005 - One Hand Jerking: Reports From an Investigative Satirist, Foreword by Harry Shearer, Introduction by Lewis Black (Seven Stories Press) ISBN 1-58322-696-6

[edit] Collections of drug stories

[edit] Articles collections books

  • 1971 - How a Satirical Editor Became a Yippie Conspirator in Ten Easy Years (Putnam)
  • 1985 - The Best of the Realist: The 60's Most Outrageously Irreverent Magazine (Running Press) ISBN 0-89471-289-6
  • 1996 - The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race: The Satirical Writings of Paul Krassner Introduction by Kurt Vonnegut (Seven Stories Press) ISBN 1-888363-44-4
  • 2002 - Murder at the Conspiracy Convention: And Other American Absurdities introduced by George Carlin (Barricade Books, Inc.) ISBN 1-56980-231-9

[edit] Articles

[edit] Interviews

[edit] Discography

  • 1999 - Sex, Drugs and the Antichrist: Paul Krassner at MIT (Sheridan Square Entertainment)
  • 2000 - Campaign In the Ass (Artemis Records)
  • 2002 - Irony Lives (Artemis Records)
  • 2004 - The Zen Bastard Rides Again (Artemis Records)

[edit] References

  1. ^ "An IMC Interview with Paul Krassner" by Brian A. Pace, 06.May.2004 14:05
  2. ^ a b c d e Krassner bio at paulkrassner.com
  3. ^ The original FUCK COMMUNISM banner
  4. ^ Kurt Vonnegut's Foreword to Krassner's The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race
  5. ^ The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book - The Realist, Issue No. 74 - May 1967, cover page and page 18
  6. ^ Paul Krassner and The Realist by Elliot Feldman
  7. ^ Cat Simril Interviews Paul Krassner by CAT SIMRILin from "Adbusters Quarterly" Journal of the Mental Environment (Winter 1995 Vol. 3 No. 3)
  8. ^ a b Here Lies Paul Krassner Reprinted from AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, vol.18, no. 2, 2000.
  9. ^ [1]
  10. ^ http://www.rockhall.com/exhibitpast/take-you-higher/
  11. ^ Reflections on the Art of the Put-on by Michael DooleyJuly 03, 2007

[edit] External links

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