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NY Times, July 22, 2019
Paul Krassner, Anarchist, Prankster and a Yippies Founder, Dies at 87
By Joseph Berger
He was a prankster, a master of the put-on that thumbed its nose at what
he saw as a stuffy and blundering political establishment.
And as much as anyone else, Paul Krassner epitomized a strain of
anarchic 1960s activism — one that became identified with the Yippies as
they nominated a pig for president and rained dollar bills onto the
floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Along with Abbie Hoffman and
Jerry Rubin and a few others, Mr. Krassner helped found that group.
He was the founder and editor of The Realist, among the earliest
underground humor magazines, one that was known for outlandish and
raunchy cartoons and iconoclastic political and social commentary. Its
contributors included Norman Mailer, Jules Feiffer, Terry Southern,
Joseph Heller, Mort Sahl, Edward Sorel and Robert Grossman. With some
very long breaks, it endured into the 21st century.
Yet so naturally irreverent was Mr. Krassner that when People magazine
labeled him the “father of the underground press,” he demanded a
paternity test.
In all, he helped propagate a certain absurdist sensibility that
encouraged people like the cartoonists R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman and
the comedian George Carlin to be more daring in mocking the insanities
and hypocrisies of war, politics and much of modern life.
Mr. Krassner died on Sunday at his home in Desert Hot Springs, Calif.,
his daughter, Holly Krassner Dawson, said. He was 87. She did not give a
cause, but said he had been in hospice care.
Mr. Krassner was writing freelance pieces for Mad magazine in 1958 when
he realized that there was no equivalent satirical publication for
adults; Mad, he could see, was largely targeted at teenagers. So he
started The Realist out of the Mad offices, and it began regular monthly
publication. By 1967 its circulation had peaked at 100,000.
“I had no role models and no competition, just an open field mined with
taboos waiting to be exploded,” Mr. Krassner wrote in his autobiography.
The magazine’s most famous cartoon was one, drawn in 1967 by the Mad
artist Wally Wood, of an orgy featuring Snow White, Donald Duck and a
bevy of Disney characters enjoying a variety of sexual positions.
(Mickey Mouse is shown shooting heroin.) Later, digitally colored by a
former Disney artist, it became a hot-selling poster that supplied Mr.
Krassner with modest royalties into old age.
The Realist’s most famous article was one Mr. Krassner wrote portraying
Lyndon B. Johnson as sexually penetrating a bullet wound in John F.
Kennedy’s neck while accompanying the assassinated president’s body back
to Washington on Air Force One. The headline of the article was “The
Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,” and it claimed — falsely
— to be material that had been removed from William Manchester’s book
“The Death of a President.”
“People across the country believed — if only for a moment — that an act
of presidential necrophilia had taken place,” Mr. Krassner told an
interviewer in 1995. “The imagery was so shocking, it broke through the
notion that the war in Vietnam was being conducted by sane men.”
Avery Corman, the author of “Kramer vs. Kramer” and other books, whose
first essays appeared in The Realist, called Mr. Krassner “a cultural
pioneer.”
“The pieces he wrote himself and the material written by others were
saying to people that what we’re told by the establishment and the media
may not be true, may be distorted, and at that time that was not an
accepted idea,” Mr. Corman said in a 2016 interview. “For young people
trying to dope out what the world was like, being a Realist reader was a
way of distinguishing yourself: ‘I’m not gullible, I’m skeptical.’”
By the 1970s, The Realist was struggling financially and being published
more haphazardly; for years it did not come out at all. In the mid-1980s
it was revived as a newsletter. It ceased publication in 2001.
Mr. Krassner was also the keeper of the legacy of one of his mentors,
Lenny Bruce. He edited Bruce’s autobiography, “How to Talk Dirty and
Influence People” (1965), and was nominated for a Grammy Award for his
5,000-word liner notes to a collection of Bruce’s nightclub routines,
“Let the Buyer Beware.”
Mr. Krassner in 2009. He once said: “It’s strange to be 70 and still
identify with a youth movement. But I’d rather identify with evolution
than stagnation.”CreditEric Reed/Associated Press
Encouraged by Bruce, Mr. Krassner often took to the stage, delivering
comic monologues at nightclubs like the Village Gate. He and his East
Village friends also dreamed up pieces of public tomfoolery.
In one, in 1968, a group of 60 hippies chose to turn the tables on
tourists streaming into the East Village to gape at its scruffy,
longhaired denizens. With cameras dangling from their necks, the hippies
hired a Greyhound bus for a sightseeing tour of the tidy middle-class
neighborhoods of Queens.
In 1967, Mr. Krassner, Hoffman and friends formed an organization to
meld hippies and earnest political types. Mr. Krassner dreamed up the
name Youth International Party — Yippie for short.
Their theatrical shenanigans included streaming to Washington to
“levitate” the Pentagon and organizing a nighttime “yip-in” at Grand
Central Terminal to celebrate spring; it drew some 3,000 revelers,
prompting nightstick-swinging police officers to charge the crowd and
arrest 17 as protesters yelled “Fascists!” The press seemed transfixed
by their antics.
“It was mutual manipulation,” Mr. Krassner said, reflecting on his life
in an interview for this obituary in 2016. “We gave them good stories
and sound bites, and they gave us free publicity.”
In August 1968, the group made its way to the Democratic National
Convention in Chicago and held a festival that, along with antiwar
protests, prompted another police charge, this one bloodier. Television
cameras caught what a national commission was to term “a police riot.”
Hoffman and Rubin were among those convicted of crossing state lines to
incite a riot, though those convictions were reversed on appeal. Mr.
Krassner was named an unindicted co-conspirator.
Paul Krassner was born on April 9, 1932, in Brooklyn, the second of
three children. His father, Michael, was a printing compositor for The
Long Island Star-Journal who had a cynical streak and, according to his
son, worried about efforts by government and business “to manipulate the
human mind.” His mother, Ida, who had immigrated as an infant from
Russia, was a legal secretary and instilled in him the maxim “Nothing
ventured, nothing gained.”
Paul was a violin prodigy, playing a Vivaldi concerto at Carnegie Hall
when he was 6, but he gave up practicing regularly because he found his
instructor too controlling. Still, he traced his bent for humor to that
Carnegie Hall recital. When in midperformance he tried to soothe an itch
in his left leg by scratching it with his right foot, the audience burst
out laughing, and he realized he loved that sound more than the applause
for his playing.
He was bar mitzvahed, but, he said, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had
already persuaded him to identify as an atheist. He attended the Baruch
campus of City College, though he dropped out three credits short of a
degree, disappointing his parents.
“They had learned by then that I was a rebel,” he said.
He was already earning money working for The Independent, a newspaper
run by the anti-censorship crusader Lyle Stuart. It turned out that Mr.
Stuart was also the business manager of Mad, and Mr. Krassner began
writing humor pieces for it.
Mr. Stuart also gave him a list of subscribers to a small progressive
magazine that was closing down, and Mr. Krassner managed to persuade 600
of those readers to buy his satirical replacement, The Realist.
An interview in the magazine with a doctor who performed abortions at a
time when they were illegal led to Mr. Krassner’s first foray into
serious activism. After receiving calls from women seeking information
about how they, too, could obtain abortions, he set up a service to
refer pregnant women to qualified doctors. He was subpoenaed by two
different district attorneys but never prosecuted.
With the decline and demise of The Realist, Mr. Krassner had to scratch
out a living, and eventually Social Security checks were a mainstay. He
wrote columns for magazines like High Times and Adult Video News and
blogs for The Huffington Post (now HuffPost). He served a short stint as
publisher of Hustler. In 1994 he published a memoir, “Confessions of a
Raving Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture,” which he
later updated, and he also produced three collections of reminiscences
about people’s experiences with marijuana, hallucinogenic mushrooms and
other drugs.
Mr. Krassner’s first marriage, to Jeanne Johnson, ended in divorce. In
addition to his daughter, from his first marriage, his survivors include
his wife, Nancy Cain; a brother, George, and one grandchild.
In 2003, Mr. Krassner joined with others surviving Yippies to form a
speakers bureau, charging several thousand dollars for talks to college
audiences.
“This is the antiwar equivalent of a veterans’ group,” Mr. Krassner told
The New York Times. “It’s strange to be 70 and still identify with a
youth movement. But I’d rather identify with evolution than stagnation.”
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