In The Jester's Court

Paul Krassner On The Virtues Of Irreverence, Indecency, And Illegal Drugs

Paul Krassner has been spreading his witty, sometimes snide, and often political brand of humor since the late 1950s. His publication the Realist was the underground journal of the counterculture during the sixties and seventies, breaking political stories and covering topics that were taboo for the mainstream press. Krassner became known for interweaving current events, social criticism, and satire in a manner not previously seen in print. 

Born and raised in New York City, Krassner was a violin prodigy, and in 1939, at the age of six, he became the youngest person ever to perform at Carnegie Hall. In the 1950s he worked as a writer for comedian Steve Allen and for Mad magazine, and he became friends with stand-up comic Lenny Bruce. Krassner edited Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, and at Bruce’s encouragement began performing stand-up comedy himself at the Village Gate nightclub in New York City.

As editor of the Realist, Krassner approached journalism not as an objective observer but as a participant in many of the stories he covered. After he interviewed a doctor who performed illegal abortions, Krassner ran an underground abortion referral service. He wrote about the antiwar movement while he was an active member of it. And in addition to publishing articles on the psychedelic revolution, he took lsd with the revolution’s unofficial leader, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, and the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, a former associate of Leary’s at Harvard. Later Krassner joined novelist Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, who traveled the country spreading the gospel of psychedelics. 

In 1967 Krassner cofounded (with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin) the Yippies, a countercultural political party that led theatrical demonstrations outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. At the height of the Vietnam War, Krassner was on an fbi list of radicals to be rounded up in the event of a national emergency. His friends John Lennon and Yoko Ono financed a 1972 issue of the Realist that exposed the Watergate break-in before journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did so in the mainstream press. In 1978 publisher Larry Flynt hired Krassner to take over the pornographic men’s magazine Hustler. The job lasted only six months, during which time Krassner appeared as a centerfold in the magazine. 

In 2004 Krassner received an American Civil Liberties Union Upton Sinclair Award for his dedication to freedom of expression, and at the fourteenth annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, Krassner was inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame by the publication High Times. His articles have been published in Rolling Stone, Playboy, Penthouse, Mother Jones, the Nation, the New York Press, National Lampoon, the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, and Funny Times. The Realist printed its last issue in 2001, but Krassner is still active as a writer, contributing a monthly column to High Times and a bimonthly column to Adult Video News Online. He is a regular columnist for the Huffington Post website and has been actively involved in movements to end the Iraq War and to legalize marijuana. (“Cigarettes are legal, and smoking them causes the death of twelve hundred people a day,” he says. “Marijuana is illegal, and the worst side effect is maybe you’ll raid your neighbor’s refrigerator.”) 

Krassner has released six comedy albums and authored numerous books, including his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture (Touchstone) — which he is currently updating and expanding for a possible new edition — and One Hand Jerking: Reports from an Investigative Satirist (Seven Stories Press). His most recent collection, Who’s to Say What’s Obscene? Politics, Culture, and Comedy in America Today, will be published by City Lights Books in July of this year.

Krassner lives in southern California’s Desert Hot Springs with his wife, Nancy Cain, whom he married on April Fool’s Day twenty years ago. When I arrived at their home, just prior to last year’s presidential election, he answered the door wearing jeans and a black t-shirt that said, “Stop Bitching — Start a Revolution.” He walks with a cane because of a beating he suffered at the hands of two San Francisco cops during the riot following the voluntary-manslaughter verdict in the trial of Dan White, who had assassinated Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk. Krassner’s dark, curly hair and youthful demeanor make him appear younger than seventy-six.  

On the walls of Krassner’s home office hang a portrait of Albert Einstein with the maxim “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” a photo of the Great Pyramid of Giza (from when Krassner traveled to Egypt for the Grateful Dead concerts there in 1978), and a trickster icon from a healers-and-shamans expedition in Ecuador. Outside the window, in a part of the yard he calls “Birdland,” doves, finches, and starlings were bathing, and hummingbirds hovered by huge blossoms. We were serenaded by a mockingbird Krassner had nicknamed “Plagiarist.” True to form, halfway through our conversation, Krassner lit up a fat joint.

Kupfer: Who are your influences?

Krassner: I come out of a tradition of American humorists that includes Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Will Rogers. My first modern influence was Lyle Stuart, who published the Independent, where I did my apprenticeship in journalism and wrote a column titled “Freedom of Wit.” Another of my mentors was Jean Shepherd, the radio humorist. In the middle of the night he’d talk about how you might explain an amusement park to a Venusian, or about a man who could taste an ice cube and tell you the make and model of the refrigerator it came from. Comedian Lenny Bruce was my role model as a stand-up performer, and novelist Joseph Heller was my biggest influence as a satirical writer. Heller explained to me how, in his book Catch-22, he used exaggeration so gradually that unreality became more credible than reality. 

Kupfer: You have done stand-up comedy for nearly fifty years. How have your audiences changed?

Krassner: I think they’re more aware now of the contradictions in society: the phony piety, the hypocrisy. And I’ve evolved right along with them. Performing, for me, is a two-way street. English is my second language. Laughter is my first.

Kupfer: Do you aspire to foster social change with your satire, or do you just want to see how far you can push the limits? 

Krassner: In the wishful-thinking corner of my mind, pushing the limits and fostering social change are inextricably connected, but I don’t have any delusions that I’ve inspired an epidemic of epiphanies. People don’t like to be lectured to, but if you can make them laugh, their defenses come down, and for the time being they’ve accepted whatever truth is embedded in your humor. When a large audience of people are all laughing together, no matter how disparate their backgrounds are, it’s a unifying moment. But who’s to say how long that moment of truth or unity lasts and whether it leads to any action? It’s one more positive input, but rarely a tipping point.

Kupfer: What pushed you into the role of provocateur?

Krassner: I couldn’t help but notice the difference between what I experienced in the streets and the way it was reported in the mainstream media, which acted as cheerleaders for the suppression of dissent.

Kupfer: Was there some early life event that led you to this calling?

Krassner: I was a child-prodigy violinist and at the age of six played the Vivaldi Concerto in A Minor at Carnegie Hall. A year later I saw my first movie, Intermezzo, which was also Ingrid Bergman’s first major movie, and I fell in love with the theme song. I couldn’t fathom why it felt so good to hear a certain combination of notes in a certain order with a particular rhythm, but it gave me enormous pleasure to hum that melody over and over to myself. It was like having a secret companion. When I told my violin teacher that I wanted to learn how to play the movie theme, he sneered and said, “That’s not right for you.” His words reverberated in my head. That’s not right for you. How could he know? For me, this was not merely a refusal of my request; it was a declaration of war upon the individual. In self-defense I drove him crazy during lessons, and after he died, I bought the sheet music to “Intermezzo” and taught myself to play it. That was the end of my musical career. I had a talent for playing the violin, but I had a passion for making people laugh. 

A couple of decades later I heard different metaphors for that kind of experience. Timothy Leary talked about the way “people try to get you onto their game board.” And Ken Kesey warned, “Always stay in your own movie.”

Kupfer: How did you maintain your integrity as the editor and publisher of the Realist? 

Krassner: I didn’t have to answer to anyone. There was no board of directors and no advertisers, and the readers trusted me not to be afraid to offend them — though sometimes they said, “Well, now you’ve gone too far.” Money was always tight, and I had to subsidize the magazine by doing interviews for Playboy and speaking at college campuses. I was forced to stop publishing in 1974 when I ran out of money, but in 1985 I got a five-thousand-dollar grant to start it up again as a newsletter, which lasted until 2001.

Kupfer: What was it like in the early days of the underground press?

Krassner: When People magazine labeled me “father of the underground press,” I demanded a paternity test. “Underground” is a misnomer, because it wasn’t a secret who published those weeklies or where you could get copies. A truly underground paper was the Outlaw, which was clandestinely published by inmates and staffers at San Quentin State Prison. 

Kupfer: It seems as if “underground” publications are even more accessible today. You can get Earth First! Journal at Borders and Barnes & Noble now.

Krassner: That’s good news in terms of infiltrating the mainstream. Of course, with the possibility of Barnes & Noble buying out Borders, there may soon be one book giant: Barnes & Noble without Borders.

Kupfer: When you relaunched the Realist as a newsletter, you said in your editorial statement, “Irreverence is still our only sacred cow.” 

Krassner: I’ve had second thoughts about that since then. There seems to be too much irreverence for its own sake these days. In some cases victims, rather than oppressors, have become the target.

Kupfer: Do you have any thoughts on the New Yorker’s cartoon cover last year picturing Barack and Michelle Obama as anti-American terrorists? Is this what you’d call “irreverence for its own sake”?

Krassner: No, although I understood how people with a pro-Obama agenda might worry the cover would be misunderstood by a severely dumbed-down public. I thought it was a brilliant parody of the inaccurate negative stereotypes perpetuated by the right-wing propaganda machine.

Kupfer: There seems to be a cottage industry in humorous coverage of contemporary affairs these days: The satirical newspaper the Onion is distributed nationally. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert both have satirical “news” shows on the Comedy Central network. What is the state of irony and irreverence in the U.S.? 

Krassner: Reality keeps nipping at the heels of satire — and lately outdistancing it. That wasn’t a satirist who said there were dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark; it was an earnest creationist trying to reconcile science and religion. 

The more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward those who are responsible for that repression. But too often sarcasm passes for irony, name-calling passes for insight, bleeped-out four-letter words pass for wit, and lowest-common-denominator jokes pass for analysis. Satire should have a point of view. It doesn’t have to get a belly laugh. It does have to present criticism. 

Kupfer: Presidential candidates have been eager to appear on Saturday Night Live and the Stewart and Colbert shows. Does humor have more influence in the world of politics now compared to when you began in comedy? 

Krassner: I wonder if that sort of humor only pacifies the audience, an effect philosopher Herbert Marcuse called “repressive tolerance.” After all, appearances on comedy shows are intended to humanize political candidates. In 1968 Richard Nixon said, “Sock it to me,” on Laugh-In and defeated his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, who’d turned down an invitation to be on the show. Forty years later Jay Leno tosses softball questions to politicians, and David Letterman’s writers supply Hillary Clinton with a “Top-Ten List” to read off the teleprompter. Politicians go on The Daily Show so Jon Stewart can interrupt their stump speeches with his compulsive punch lines. I get frustrated when Stewart sucks up to war criminals like Henry Kissinger and Pakistan’s former dictator Pervez Musharraf. On the other hand, he has had Jimmy Carter on to assert that any presidential candidate must be approved by the pro-Israel lobby. That video is “no longer available” on YouTube. 

Kupfer: The Left in the U.S. is sometimes accused of being humorless. Is this true?

Krassner: I find it unfair to generalize about the humorlessness of any group, whether it’s the Left, the Right, the feminists, or, for that matter, comedians. It’s true that the old Left criticized the New Left for being too frivolous, but that had more to do with respectability than with humor or the lack of it. 

Kupfer: You used to write for Mad magazine. What’s your assessment of its impact on generations of Americans?

Krassner: All I know is that it stimulates kids’ natural sense of irreverence and their desire to share it. At a certain point, when the circulation reached 1.25 million — virtually all of them preteens and teenagers — a few of the ideas I pitched as a freelancer were rejected because they were “too adult.” (I said to publisher Bill Gaines, “I guess you don’t want to change horses in midstream,” and he said, “Not when the horse has a rocket up its ass.”) That’s one of the reasons why I started the Realist; there was no satirical magazine for adults.  

Kupfer: Through your writing and comedy, you’ve helped a generation or two of young people develop a jaded, questioning attitude. Is this what you set out to do?

Krassner: All I wanted to do was communicate without compromise. Abbie Hoffman once chastised me, saying, “You’re not a leader; you don’t urge people to do things; you’re just a social gadfly.” And he was right. I’m not a leader, except by example. It’s gratifying, though, when I hear from someone who was inspired by my work to take a progressive, humane stance. But there were also Realist readers who were professional assholes. As Rod Serling said when a fan of his tv show The Twilight Zone committed a copycat murder based on an episode of the program, “I am responsible to my audience, not for them.”

Kupfer: You associated with so many cultural icons of the sixties and seventies, from former Beatle John Lennon and his artist wife, Yoko Ono, to men’s-magazine publishers Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt. How did you come to meet them all? 

Krassner: The Realist resonated with their sensibilities. I had even interviewed several of them for the Realist. My favorite moment came when I asked Ram Dass, “If you and I were to exchange philosophies — if I believed in reincarnation and you didn’t — how do you think our behavior would change?” He hesitated for a second, then replied: “Well, if you believed in reincarnation, you would never ask a question like that.” And then his low chuckle of amusement and surprise blossomed into an uproarious belly laugh of delight as he savored the implications of his own Zen-like answer. I found myself playing that segment of the tape over and over again, like a favorite piece of music.

Kupfer: What’s most upsetting to you in the world today?

Krassner: The creeping — no, galloping — fascism in this country, specifically the lack of accountability in government agencies, multinational corporations, and organized religion. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the injustice and anguish they cause. Power without compassion is the name of their game, and dehumanization is their modus operandi. They reek with arrogance. There’s a trickle-up effect, from the brutality permitted in the prison system, to those federal officials who approve international torture. And there’s a trickle-down effect, from Karl Rove’s refusing to testify under oath about the political firings of U.S. attorneys, to the court system in which a just-released African American spent twenty-six years behind bars because the prosecutors withheld evidence of his innocence. And yet those prosecutors cannot be legally punished. At the very least we should give them empathy implants.

Kupfer: Do you really think the U.S. has descended into fascism under George W. Bush?

Krassner: I’m sorry, but the patriot Act won’t allow me to answer that. I’ll just say this: Everything that Hitler did was in keeping with laws that had been recently passed. 

Kupfer: When the counterculture becomes enveloped by the culture, what gets lost?

Krassner: Idealism gets replaced by fashion, from tie-dyed t-shirts to lava lamps. People who’ve never ingested lsd refer to something as being “like such-and-such on acid.” The whole baby-boomer generation has now become a marketing demographic. Who ever expected R. Crumb, whose comics were underground in the sixties, to have three-page spreads in the New Yorker?

Kupfer: Well, wasn’t the mantra of the flower children “Join us”?

Krassner: We called that out to spectators in a lot of marches. The irony is that while [former Republican and current publisher of the Huffington Post] Arianna Huffington, for example, did join us and has become a powerful voice for rationality and fairness, some former flower children who have grown thorns of cynicism criticize her as an opportunist. When opportunity knocks, don’t knock opportunity. Huffington joined us because she’s been a good listener with an open mind and a proactive spirit.

Kupfer: The mass media have painted the hippies as purveyors of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, not as social and cultural prophets.

Krassner: Too much has been made of the hippies’ association with hedonism as opposed to fundamental cultural shifts. That’s just an example of history being distorted, transforming the prophetic into the pathetic. Fortunately a more comprehensive rendering of countercultural history is still in progress. 

Kupfer: What is the healthiest cultural shift you see developing today?

Krassner: There seems to be a mass awakening in process, comparable to the evolutionary jump in consciousness that took place during the sixties. It gives me a sense of hope, as well as a sense of continuity, that countercultural values have “infiltrated” the mainstream: the peace movement, organic food, protecting the rain forests, environmental sustainability, growing hemp, recycling waste, racial equality, feminism, animal rights, renewable energy. The seeds that were planted then continue to blossom, and the counterculture that began in the sixties continues to be celebrated at such annual events as the Rainbow Gathering, Burning Man, Earthdance, the Oregon Country Fair, and the Starwood Festival. And all the psychedelic relics I know have not stopped serving as agents of change.

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