Paul Krassner
Writer, satirist and LSD enthusiast who founded the anarchic ‘Yippies’ and caused general outrage
PAUL KRASSNER, who has died aged 87, was a one-time violin prodigy who became a pioneer of the US underground press as founder, in 1958, of The Realist, a counterculture satirical magazine which, over the years, covered, exposed – and often fabricated – scandals and outraged everyone from the Kennedy clan to Peanuts fans and the Church of Scientology.
Once described by the FBI as a “raving, unconfined nut”, in 1967, with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, Krassner helped to found the Yippies, supposedly short for the Youth International Party, a loose anarchic grouping of dissidents which, according to Krassner’s 2002 citation at the Counterculture Hall of Fame (into which, due to inevitable casualties, he was the first living person to be inducted), “reshaped the image of the Left-wing political activist from humourless bookworm to fun-loving prankster”.
Paul James Krassner was born on April 9 1932 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Michael, was a Hungarianborn printing compositor, his mother, Ida, a Russian-born legal secretary.
Young Paul first came to public notice aged six when he became the youngest artist at the time to appear on stage at Carnegie Hall, performing the violin solo in Vivaldi’s Concerto in A Minor.
In his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut (1994), Krassner recalled that as he began to play, his leg began to itch so badly that he raised his other foot to scratch it and the audience laughed: “It was only when they laughed that we had really connected … I wanted to hear it again. I was hooked.” The violin was soon gathering dust.
While reading journalism at the Baruch campus of City College, New York, which he left without taking a degree, Krassner performed as a stand-up comedian, started working for Lyle Stuart’s anti-censorship paper The Independent and, after doing stand-up at a Christmas party for the teen satirical magazine Mad, began to freelance for the publication.
The inspiration for The Realist came from an unlikely source. “I read an article by Malcolm Muggeridge [the
former editor of Punch] in Esquire called ‘America Needs a Punch’,” Krassner recalled. “That was my marching orders.”
The first edition carried a discussion about atomic testing with Bertrand Russell, an article on the laws preventing mixed marriages in Israel and a satirical swipe at telethons. Krassner wrote the copy, printed it and distributed it himself by hand until a small distributor took it on. The magazine was soon selling 100,000 copies.
By this time The Realist was less an American version of Punch than of the underground magazine Oz with its mixture of satire, muckraking and obscenity. It achieved its greatest notoriety in 1967 when it printed what Krassner claimed (falsely) were unpublished excerpts from William Manchester’s book on the assassination of John F Kennedy, The Death of a President, including a passage describing Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson having sex with JFK’S dead body – a “metaphor for Johnson’s crude character”, Krassner explained later.
Another issue included a cartoon of an orgy featuring Snow White, Donald Duck and other Disney characters, with Mickey Mouse on the side shooting up heroin.
Along with such spoofs and articles with titles such as “I Was an Abortionist for the FBI” The Realist also published interviews with such figures as Lenny Bruce, Hugh Hefner, Woody Allen and Timothy Leary, while contributors included Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Robert Grossman.
The magazine was often subjected to police raids and threatened with writs, notably when the Church of Scientology objected to a satirical suggestion that Robert Kennedy’s assassin had been a senior church member. The Scientologists sued for $750,000 until someone told them that they would look ridiculous if they continued.
The Realist carried no advertising and was produced on a shoestring, Krassner subsidising it by freelancing for magazines such as Playboy as well as with donations from well-wishers such as Yoko Ono, who included Krassner’s legs in Up Your Legs Forever, a 1971 film consisting entirely of bare legs.
Meanwhile as Yippie activists set about disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago by holding their own presidential nomination in the city with a live pig as their candidate, Krassner angered civic leaders by suggesting that the Yippies were planning to put LSD in Chicago’s water supply. By this time he had become an enthusiast for the hallucinogenic, going on trips with Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey.
In 1968 the 78-year-old Groucho Marx signed up to play a mobster called “God” in the notoriously awful film Skidoo, directed by Otto Preminger. The film advocated the use of LSD, and Groucho, who did not want to give the wrong impression of what an acid trip was like, invited Krassner to arrange and accompany him on his first trip.
The occasion seems to have been a success, Groucho exclaiming at one point, “I’m supposed to be Jewish, but I was seeing the most beautiful visions of Gothic cathedrals.”
In 1970 Krassner was called as a defence witness in the Chicago 7 case, in which some of his friends were tried on charges of inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. He took a large dose of LSD before testifying, and gave his evidence while hallucinating. It was some time before his friends in the dock were prepared to forgive him.
The Realist suspended publication in 1974 and in the mid-1970s Krassner moved to San Francisco, where he freelanced for magazines such as Newsweek and Playboy, did a bit of stand-up comedy, had a brief stint as publisher of Hustler when its owner, Larry Flynt, became a born-again Christian, and under the pseudonym “Rumpelforeskin” presented a radio show on a local “free-form rock music station”, from which he was sacked after an on-air stunt with a sex worker.
In 1985 he moved to Venice Beach in California and resurrected The Realist as a newsletter, publishing it until 2001, when he moved to Desert Hot Springs – by which time, as he reflected ruefully, “bad taste had become an industry.” One of its last editions featured a cartoon of characters from the Peanuts comic strip engaged in various sex acts.
A great friend of Lenny Bruce, Krassner edited Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (1965), and was nominated for a Grammy for his sleeve notes to a collection of Bruce’s nightclub routines, Let the Buyer Beware. Krassner also published three collections of accounts of experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.
His first marriage, to Jeanne Johnson, was dissolved. He is survived by their daughter and by his second wife, Nancy Cain.
Paul Krassner, born April 9 1932, died July 21 2019