Obituary
Paul Krassner, 87, Yippies co-founder, editor
house in “the middle of Vivaldi’s ‘Concert
in A Minor’” and started scratching
an itch on his left foot with his right
foot. The audience roared.
“And I was awakened by the
sound of an audience laughing,”
he said. “It was a life-changing
moment. I perceived reality
through the prism of absurdity.
I had a technique for playing the
violin, but I had a passion for
making people laugh.”
“Irreverence is our only sacred
cow” was Krassner’s motto for The Realist,
whose A-list contributors ranged
from Norman Mailer to Mort Sahl.
One of his most popular offerings at
the magazine, which he launched with
cheap paper in 1958, was a wall poster
showing Disneyland cartoon characters
at a 1967 “Disneyland Memorial
Orgy.”
His most infamous was a seemingly
LSD-inspired fantasy of President Lyndon
Baines Johnson committing necrophilia
in the bullet hole of John F. Kennedy’s
corpse while aboard Air Force
One. Called “The Parts Left out of the
Manchester book,” the gruesome article
was based on a biography of J.F.K. by
William Manchester, which had been
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BY MARY REINHOLZ
Iconoclastic author and humorist
Paul Krassner, who coined the
name “Yippie” for the Youth International
Party and catapulted to 1960s
counterculture fame, died Sunday at
his Desert Hot Springs home in Southern
California. He was 87.
Krassner was also the founder/editor
of The Realist, a now-defunct satirical
publication he produced in the East
Village while writing for Mad magazine.
He was also a former standup comic at
The Village Gate.
His death followed a monthlong
undiagnosed illness, said his daughter
Holly Krassner Dawson. He had been
ailing for about a year with an apparent
neurological disorder, according to
friends.
Krassner, who has been touted as a
forerunner to cutting-edge funnymen
like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert —
blending fact with fi ction — was born
in Brooklyn to Jewish parents but considered
himself an atheist. He started
in show business as a 6-year-old child
violin prodigy at Carnegie Hall. Five
years ago, he told this writer how he fell
asleep on the stage in the august music
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PHOTO BY MARY REINHOLZ
Last April, Jim Drougas, owner
of Unoppressive Nonimperialist
Bargain Books, on Carmine St.,
live-streamed Paul Krassner into
the shop for a book talk.
rejected by his widow Jacqueline Kennedy.
Some prominent writers thought
Krassner’s put-on was true.
“He went beyond irreverent to psychedelic
and putting people on another
life path,” said Los Angeles journalist
Rex Weiner, a former contributor to the
underground East Village Other and a
founder of the short-lived New York
Ace in the early 1970s. In noting how
Krassner used to say, “The truth is silly
putty,” Weiner noted that Krassner’s
mind-bending satire “may have led to
a disregard for objective truth” in the
Trump era. “But at the time,” Weiner
noted, “the government was deceiving
the public on everything — Vietnam
and civil rights.” Krassner, he said,
wanted to alter people’s perceptions.
Krassner wrote about 20 books, including
second editions, and edited the
autobiography of mentor Lenny Bruce’s
“How to Talk Dirty and Infl uence People.”
Besides co-founding the Youth
International Party in 1967, he was a
member of Ken Kesey’s band of Merry
Pranksters.
He always seemed intent on “giving
the fi nger to The Man,” said fellow Yippie
Aron “The Pie Man” Kay, 69, who
fi rst met Krassner at an A.J. Liebling
media conference at Manhattan’s Commodore
Hotel in 1974. “He was promoting
The Realist and I was promoting
Yipster Times,” recalled Kay.
He recalled Krassner publicly
French-kissing the so-called “Realist
Nun” Margo St. James, a politicized sex
worker in a nun’s habit who founded a
prostitutes-rights group in San Francisco
called Coyote (Call Off Your Tired
Old Ethics). He acknowledged that
such antics by Krassner inspired him to
take a counterculture job throwing pies
at political enemies.
Kay lauded Krassner for his early advocacy
of women’s reproductive rights.
“He ran an underground abortion
network providing abortion referrals
to women who couldn’t afford to go to
Europe,” he recalled. This was long before
the 1973 passage of Roe v. Wade,
the U.S. Supreme Court decision granting
women the legal right to terminate
unwanted pregnancies.
Krassner went on to join fellow
Youth International Party co-founders
like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin
at the wildly chaotic 1967 Democratic
National, Convention, dodging clubwielding
Chicago cops.
He was later dubbed an unindicted
co-conspirator for the riotous scene,
and testifi ed at trial reportedly stoned
on LSD, according to Los Angeles author
Pat Thomas, who published a coffee
table biography of Yippie leader
Jerry Rubin last year.
Thomas, who kept in touch with
Krassner since their fi rst meeting in
2009, said that the older man was “profeminist
but I know some feminists were
pissed when he was briefl y an editor at
Hustler magazine.” Thomas noted that
decades earlier, Krassner gave money to
panhandling actress and writer Valerie
Solanas to help her publish her savagely
satirical “The Scum Manifesto,” not
long before she shot and nearly killed
Andy Warhol in 1968.
“He gave her $50 so she could produce
‘The Scum Manifesto,’” Thomas
said. “He said it wasn’t right for The
Realist, but he felt she should print it
on her own.”
Krassner, he noted, once told him he
went to the Spahn Ranch in Simi Valley
and “dropped acid” with Charles
Manson follower Squeaky Fromme, “so
he would know what it felt like to be
part of the Manson Family. Paul was
fearless,” added Thomas in a phone interview.
“I didn’t grill him about it. It
was just a tiny anecdote he threw out
one day.”
These days, Thomas puts Krassner
in the company of Jewish counterculture
fi gures like the late beat poet Allen
Ginsberg.
“He was there before The Onion,
before Spy,” he said. “He really invented
print political satire. I think he
mastered the art, like Lenny Bruce and
George Carlin. He made an impact.”
Besides his daughter Holly, Krassner
is survived by his second wife, Nancy
Cain, and a granddaughter Talia. Arrangements
for a memorial are pending.
His latest book is “Zapped by the
God of Absurdity, The Best of Paul
Krassner” (Fantagraphics Books, September
2019).
8 July 25, 2019 TVG Schneps Media
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