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Paul Krassner

 
Artist: Paul Krassner
Home > Library > Entertainment & Arts > Pop Artists

Similar Artists:

Don Imus, Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Timothy Leary

Formal Connection With:

Ram Dass, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin
  • Active: '90s, 2000s
  • Genres: Spoken Word
  • Instrument: Vocals
  • Representative Albums: "Campaign in the Ass", "Sex, Drugs & The Antichrist: At MIT", "Irony Lives

Biography

While Paul Krassner doesn't have the immediate name recognition of some of his cohorts (Lenny Bruce, Timothy Leary, and Abbie Hoffman), his irreverent, literate satire made him an unsung countercultural hero during the '60s and beyond. A crucial figure in the development of the American alternative press, Krassner was denounced by the FBI as a "raving, unconfined nut" for his independent journal the Realist, an unpredictable blend of genuine reporting, outlandish satire, witty sociopolitical commentary, and provocative subject matter. Following stints as a standup comedian and a writer for Mad magazine, Krassner began publishing the Realist in 1958, and it established him as arguably the most compelling voice in underground journalism; by the time it ceased publication in 1974, its peak circulation was estimated to be over 250,000. The Realist's trademark was its penchant for blurring the lines between real-life absurdities and satirical exaggerations, allowing readers to infer which pieces were put-ons. (Some never quite got the distinction, even in obvious cases -- including the magazine's most notorious prank, a story in which Lyndon Johnson violated John F. Kennedy's corpse aboard Air Force One.) Krassner's brand of journalism frequently crossed the line into personal activism; for example, after running an interview with an abortion doctor in the Realist (in the days prior to Roe v. Wade), Krassner began covertly referring women to competent doctors willing to perform the procedure.

Krassner hardly confined himself to Realist-related activities. Most famously, he co-founded the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, actually coining the term himself. He was associated with writer Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and was a longtime friend of LSD guru Timothy Leary, among other '60s celebrities; additionally, he edited Lenny Bruce's autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. Krassner also contributed articles to a variety of publications, winning awards from groups as diverse as Playboy magazine and the Feminist Party Media Workshop, and even served for a short time as an editor at Larry Flynt's notorious Hustler during the late '70s.

Krassner resurrected the Realist in 1985, this time as a newsletter resembling the D.I.Y. 'zine format that became widely popular during the '90s. His memoirs were published in 1993 under the title Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counter-Culture. In the late '90s, Krassner began to document his standup comedy career as well, putting out his first-ever recording (We Have Ways of Making You Laugh) in 1996. A follow-up, Brain Damage Control, appeared in 1997, as did an anthology of his satirical writings, The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race. Further comedy albums appeared in the form of 1999's Sex, Drugs, and the Antichrist: Paul Krassner at MIT and 2000's Campaign in the Ass. ~ Steve Huey, All Music Guide
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Wikipedia: Paul Krassner
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Paul Krassner (born April 9, 1932) is an author, journalist, stand-up comedian, and the founder, editor and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s.

Contents

Early life

Krassner was a child violin prodigy (and was the youngest person ever to play Carnegie Hall, in 1939 at age six).[1] In college, he majored in journalism and began performing as a standup comedian under the name Paul Maul. He recalled:

While in college, I started working for an anti-censorship paper, The Independent. After I left college I started working there full time. So, I never had a normal job where I had to be interviewed and wear a suit and tie. I became their managing editor and also did freelance stuff for Mad magazine. But Mad was aimed at a teenage audience, and there was no satirical magazine for adults. So it was a kind of organic evolution toward The Realist, which was essentially a combination of satire and alternative journalism.[2]

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was active in 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 protégé of the controversial comedian Lenny Bruce, and the editor of Bruce's autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.[3] With the encouragement of Bruce, Krassner started to perform standup comedy in 1961 at the Village Gate in New York.[3]

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."[4][5]

In 1971, five years after Lenny Bruce's death, Groucho Marx said, "I predict that in time Paul Krassner will wind up as the only live Lenny Bruce."[3]

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 described as having sexually penetrated the bullet-hole wound in the throat of JFK's corpse.[6] 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."[7] 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.".[8]

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.[9] 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."[9]

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).

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[10]. 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. In July 2009, City Lights Publishers will release Who's to Say What's Obscene?, a collection of satirical essays that explore contemporary comedy and obscenity in politics and 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), is written by Krassner himself and collects stories on LSD. The third, Magic Mushrooms and Other Highs (2004), is by Krassner too, and deals with magic mushrooms, ecstasy, peyote, mescaline, THC, opium, cocaine, ayahuasca, belladonna, ketamine, PCP, STP, "toad slime," and more.

Other activities

In 1971, Krassner worked as a weekend radio personality and disk jockey at San Francisco's ABC-FM radio affiliate, KSFX, (subsequently KGO-FM). Under the pseudonym "Rumpelforeskin", he satirized culture and politics while espousing his atheism. He was also a contributor to early issues of Mad magazine. He often appears as a stand-up comedian, and he was among those featured in the 2005 documentary The Aristocrats. Krassner also remains a prolific lecturer. He has been a frequent speaker at both the Starwood Festival[1][11] and the WinterStar Symposium.[12][13] In 1998 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 [14]. Currently, he is a columnist for The Nation, AVN Online and High Times Magazine. He also is a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.

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 the first living man to be inducted into the Counterculture Hall of Fame[15], which took place at the Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam. He received an ACLU Uppie (Upton Sinclair) Award for dedication to freedom of expression, and, according to the FBI files, he was described by the FBI as "a raving, unconfined nut."[3][16] George Carlin commented: "The FBI was right, this man is dangerous – and funny; and necessary."[3] 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.

Bibliography

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

Collections of drug stories

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
  • 2009 - Who's to Say What's Obscene? Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today (City Lights Publishers) ISBN 9780872865013

Articles

Interviews

Discography

Stand-up comedy recordings:

  • 1996 - We Have Ways of Making You Laugh (Mercury Records)
  • 1997 - Brain Damage Control (Mercury Records)
  • 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)

Filmography

References

  1. ^ "An IMC Interview with Paul Krassner" by Brian A. Pace, 06.May.2004 14:05
  2. ^ Loompanics: Paul Krassner
  3. ^ a b c d e Krassner bio at paulkrassner.com
  4. ^ The original FUCK COMMUNISM banner
  5. ^ Kurt Vonnegut's Foreword to Krassner's The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race
  6. ^ The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book - The Realist, Issue No. 74 - May 1967, cover page and page 18
  7. ^ Paul Krassner and The Realist by Elliot Feldman
  8. ^ Cat Simril Interviews Paul Krassner by CAT SIMRILin from "Adbusters Quarterly" Journal of the Mental Environment (Winter 1995 Vol. 3 No. 3)
  9. ^ a b Here Lies Paul Krassner Reprinted from AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, vol.18, no. 2, 2000.
  10. ^ BeatBooks: How A Satirical Editor Became A Yippie Conspirator In Ten Easy Years. (YIPPIE). KRASSNER, Paul
  11. ^ Kates, Bill (1997). Best of the Fests: Starwood Festival in High Times, 1997
  12. ^ Association for Consciousness Exploration. Paul Krassner
  13. ^ Association for Consciousness Exploration. WinterStar Symposium 1998
  14. ^ The Psychedelic Era
  15. ^ Guardian Website
  16. ^ Reflections on the Art of the Put-on by Michael DooleyJuly 03, 2007

External links


This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

 
 
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