Krassner was a child violin prodigy (and was the youngest person ever to play Carnegie Hall, in 1939 at age six). He is Jewish. 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.
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. With the encouragement of Bruce, Krassner started to perform standup comedy in 1961 at the Village Gate in New York.
In 1963, he created what Kurt Vonnegut described as "a 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 magicas 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."
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."
The Realist
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 "The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book", which followed the censorship of William Manchester's book on the Kennedy assassination,
The Death of a President. 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. 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." 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."
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. 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."
Krassner revived
The Realist 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. BeatBooks: How A Satirical Editor Became A Yippie Conspirator In Ten Easy Years. (YIPPIE). KRASSNER, Paul 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
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 and the WinterStar Symposium. 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. The Psychedelic Era Currently, he is a columnist for
The Nation,
AVN Online and
High Times Magazine. He also is a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post.
Krassner has also written about the Patty Hearst trial and possible connections between the Symbionese Liberation Army and the FBI.
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, 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." George Carlin commented: "The FBI was right, this man is dangerous — and funny; and necessary." 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.
