Who's to Say What's Obscene?
Page 1
WHO’S TO SAY
WHAT’S OBSCENE?
Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today
PAUL KRASSNER
Foreword by Arianna Huffington
City Lights Books • San Francisco
Copyright © 2009 by Paul Krassner
Foreword © 2009 by Arianna Huffington
All the pieces in this book were originally published in High Times, AVN Online, Season in the Sun, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, Reality Sandwich and ArthurMag.com—except for the following: “Fear and Laughing in Las Vegas” and “Strange Bedfellows Among the Yippies” were published in The Nation. “Great Moments in Memory Loss” was published in the New York Press. A shorter version of “Who’s to Say What’s Obscene?” was published in Funny Times. A shorter version of “The Disneyland Memorial Orgy” was published in the LA Weekly. A shorter version of “The Parts Left Out of Chicago 10” was published in the Los Angeles Times.
Cover design: Pollen
Cover image: Wally Wood, “The Disneyland Memorial Orgy,”
Copyright © 2006 by Paul Krassner.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Krassner, Paul.
Who’s to say what’s obscene : politics, culture and comedy in America today / by Paul Krassner ; foreword by Arianna Huffington.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-87286-501-3
1. Satire, American. I. Title.
PS3561.R286W47 2009
814'.54—dc22
2009002813
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore,
261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.
www.citylights.com
For Nancy, my constant muse
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do
generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”
—Jonathan Swift
FOREWORD BY ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
Eight years after 9/11, eight years after Ari Fleischer warned Americans that they “need to watch what they say, watch what they do,” eight years after Graydon Carter declared the death of the age of irony, eight years after Politically Incorrect was pushed off the air, and 280 years after Jonathan Swift made his Modest Proposal that Irish children be sold as food, we seem to be living in a Golden Age of political humor—and especially political satire: Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, viral YouTube videos, and after thirty-three years on the air, the rebirth of Saturday Night Live, which went from “Is that still on?” to MustSeeTV (or at least Must See on YouTube).
They are all standing on the shoulders of the great comedic bomb-throwers of the past: Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, the Smothers Brothers, the gang at National Lampoon.
And Paul Krassner—confidant of Lenny, cofounder of the Yippies, defiler of Disney characters, publisher of The Realist, investigative satirist extraordinaire.
As soon as we decided to create the Huffington Post, I knew I wanted Paul Krassner involved. His irreverence was just what the blog doctor ordered. He posted three times during the week we launched and has been at it ever since. One hundred fifty-seven posts and counting. But who’s counting?
For the longest time, American humor had lost its bite. Punch lines with a purpose, satire in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, savage wit at the service of passionate conviction had given way to the domesticated yucks of sitcoms, late-night jokes and official Washington dinners where politicians and the media skewer each other in harmless ritual combat without any fear that things might be different in the morning (Stephen Colbert’s legendary scorched-earth performance at the White House correspondents’ dinner in 2006 was the exception; Rich Little’s painfully bad 2007 follow-up the rule).
All the while, Krassner was toiling away, tilling the comedy soil and planting the subversive seeds that would flower into the bumper crop of satire we are harvesting today.
Katie Couric’s multipart interview with Sarah Palin was the turning point in how the country saw Palin—and by extension John McCain. But it was Tina Fey’s pitch-perfect take on Palin, replayed endlessly on YouTube (and HuffPost) and spread virally online, that delivered the coup de grace. It was a comedy mugging for the ages.
Jon Stewart is now the most trusted name in news for the Facebook set. Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” perfectly defined the Bush administration’s denigration of facts. South Park and Family Guy routinely draw blood with drawn characters. Doonesbury still regularly delivers a knockout punch.
And Paul Krassner keeps delivering incendiary journalism. This collection includes some of his best. Don’t miss the bit on Palin Porn (“No anal required”).
Lewis Lapham identified the satirist’s work as “the crime of arson, meaning to set a torch of words to the hospitality tents of the pompous and self-righteous.” And that great satiric arsonist Mark Twain wrote that exposure to good satire makes citizens less likely to be, as he put it, “shriveled into sheep.”
The great satirists have always been passionate reformers challenging the status quo. I once called Paul for a column I was writing and asked him how he saw his job. “Sometimes,” he told me, “humor is just a way of calling attention to the contradictions or the hypocrisy that’s going on officially. That’s the function of humor—it can alter your reality.”
Krassner has been altering our reality for some fifty years. In the process, he has inspired the work of many—including John Cusack, who says that Krassner’s radical approach to truth-telling informed his film War, Inc.—a savage, reality-altering take on Iraq.
When, in 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal, he was seeking to turn a spotlight on the indifference toward the twin Irish crises of overpopulation and hunger. His proposal was to feed young children to hungry men. “I have been assured,” he wrote, “that a young healthy child, well-nursed, is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or broiled; and I make no doubt in that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.”
In this book, Krassner carries on that savory tradition.
Read it and laugh. And wince. And become outraged. And laugh some more.
1. WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU LAUGH
WHO’S TO SAY WHAT’S OBSCENE?
I’m not talking about profanity or pornography here.
Take, for example, the fact that Barack Obama’s chief of staff backed immunity for those in the Bush administration who were the architects of justification for torture and indefinite detention without trial. Now that’s fucking obscene. Fortunately for democracy, next day the president passed that decision on to the Department of Justice, but then not on to an independent investigation, where it belongs. I’m saddened and outraged by the lack of accountability in government agencies, multinational corporations and organized religions. Nobody takes responsibility for the anguish they cause unless they’re prosecuted. Dehumanization’s the name of the game, and its players reek with arrogance.
The creator of a new Coney Island sideshow attraction—the Waterboard Thrill Ride—asked a rhetorical question: “What’s more obscene, the official position that waterboarding is not torture, or our official position that it’s a thrill ride?”
Tom Hayden wrote in an op-ed piece: “With the Congress including $50 million for the arts in the economic package, the overall annual budget for the NEA will be just short of $200 million for the coming year. By comparison we spend more on the Iraq War every day, or $341.4 million, according to the Web site costofwar.com. This is the real obscenity that goes uncensored. Yet funding for the arts is more controversial than funding for war. For decades, arts subsidies have been targeted as frivolous waste by many of the same conserv
ative Republicans willing to budget trillions for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
In a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times, Ken Johnson stated: “It’s fine to demand that U.S. automakers seeking federal money meet higher mileage requirements. But what about the workers who would pay for this increase in efficiency with their jobs? It’s obscene that these corporate incompetents are begging for more of our tax dollars while at the same time contemplating more layoffs. It is even more obscene that our tough-talking lawmakers in Washington have said nothing about insisting that taxpayer money be used first to preserve these jobs. To give these automakers untold numbers of dollars while allowing them to then place thousands of skilled people on the public dole is just plain sinful.”
A syndicated editorial cartoon by Jeff Parker depicted a job-seeker at the unemployment office explaining to the jaded clerk, “I’m looking for a high-powered executive position where I can wreck the company and still get an obscene, bailout-funded bonus . . . y’know, like those guys at A.I.G.”
It’s obscene that a secret state police report describes supporters of presidential candidates Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin and Bob Barr as militia-influenced terrorists and instructs the Missouri police to be on the lookout for the display of bumper stickers and other paraphernalia associated with the Constitutional, Campaign for Liberty, and Libertarian parties. This ain’t creeping fascism, it’s galloping fascism.
It’s obscene that former Vice President Dick Cheney’s office deleted nearly half of congressional testimony about the consequences of climate change on public health. The vast profits of our current energy, health care, insurance, pharmaceutical and credit-lending industries—all utterly obscene.
Even the notion that Starbucks can actually offer customers up to 87,000 drink combinations is obscene. Stephen Colbert—as if responding to the ability of Comcast, the country’s largest cable company, to provide a thousand channels—coined a phrase, “the obscene cult of superficiality.”
A recent book by Rick Wartzman is titled Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. California Deputy Attorney General Zackery Morazzini argues that the U.S. Supreme Court has already limited children’s access to sexually explicit material and that “violent video games are just as obscene.” Conversely, when Facebook removed from its Web site photos of women nursing their babies, “lactivists” in cyberspace formed a group of more than 100,000 called “Hey, Facebook, Breastfeeding Is Not Obscene.”
There’s a trickle-down effect of morally obscene behavior in process: from those officials who approved international torture, down to the brutality permitted in the U.S. prison system; from Karl Rove refusing to testify under oath about the political firing of several U.S. attorneys, down to our court system itself, where a recently released African American spent twenty-six years of his life behind bars because the prosecutors violated their professional duty by holding back evidence of his innocence. And yet they cannot be legally punished for it. At the very least, force ’em to be given empathy implants.
◆ ◆ ◆
Irreverence is my only sacred cow, and the more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward those who are responsible for that repression. But these days, sarcasm passes for irony. Name-calling passes for insight. Bleeped-out four-letter words pass for wit. Easy-reference jokes pass for analysis, and the audience applauds itself for recognizing the reference.
So many jokes that are based on looks and gaffes tend to trivialize them all. Good satire should have a point of view. It doesn’t have to get a belly laugh, it just has to be valid criticism, which is the classic definition of satire. Jokes with no meaningful point of view aim for the lowest common denominator, along with commercials for erectile dysfunction and politicians alike. During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidates made 110 guest shots on late-night TV shows, up from twenty-five in 2004. The appearance of political candidates on comedy shows is intended to humanize them for voters.
That’s why in 1968 Richard Nixon said “Sock it to me” on Laugh-In and why his opponent Hubert Humphrey regretted turning down their invitation to say it. Why forty years later Jay Leno tosses softball questions to such guests. Why David Letterman’s writers supplied Hillary Clinton with a “Top Ten” list to read off the teleprompter. Why politicians go on The Daily Show so that Jon Stewart can interrupt their mini stump speeches with his own compulsive punch lines. When the Pew Research Center asked Americans to name the journalist they most admired, they placed Stewart at number four, tied with Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Anderson Cooper.
Ironically, a local news channel in Los Angeles has been a sponsor of The Colbert Report. Yes, a real news show advertising on a fake news show. When Colbert was asked what he finds to be most shocking, he said, “People mistaking me for real news.” Of course, people make the same mistake about Fox News. In July 2007, a school administrator sued Fox because he was ridiculed and harassed after a fake news story—buttressed by the anchors assuring viewers they were “not making this up”—repeated a Web site prank claiming that he had suspended a pupil for tossing a ham bone on a table occupied by Somali students, knowing that the Muslims would be offended, then said, “These children have got to learn that ham is not a toy,” and that there was an effort to create an “anti-ham response plan.”
Just to make people laugh is fine, yet one wonders if the late–night TV talk-show monologues actually help to pacify the audience—what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive tolerance.” But Conan O’Brien’s job is to entertain his viewers, not to mobilize them. And what would a comedian mobilize an audience to do? Andy Kaufman mobilized his audience to go out and join him for milk and cookies. Stephen Colbert mobilized his audience to go out and buy his book. Bill Maher mobilized his audience to go out and see his movie.
Maher entertains and impacts the consciousness of his audiences, yet it was also because of his material and/or his support of Barack Obama and/or his docucomedy Religulous that a package with a threatening letter and suspicious white powder was addressed to him and opened by a staffer at the McCallum Theater in Palm Desert, California, on a Friday in October, 2008. Authorities rushed a hazardous materials team to the theater, which was shut down and quarantined for five hours. Four employees who came into contact with the package were decontaminated, and the others were evacuated. Singer/guitarist Boz Scaggs’s concert that night was canceled.
Field testing indicated that the powder wasn’t harmful. Maher had been scheduled to appear on Saturday night, and perform he did, though ticket holders had to pass through a metal detector after depositing their keys, cell phones and other electronic devices into a basket. Maher didn’t mention the incident during his act, but as he walked off the stage at the end of his show, he said to the audience, “Sorry for the trouble.” On the same day that the package for him was delivered to the theater, a similar one was received at the Los Angeles Times, addressed to two reporters. Written on the envelope inside was “Save the Babies” and “Kill All Obama Supporters.” The previous day, a similar package was delivered to an Obama campaign office in Los Angeles.
Although occasionally a viewer of Maher’s program will tell him of being “turned around” politically, in the wishful-thinking corner of my mind, pushing comedic limits and fostering social change would be inextricably connected. People don’t like to be lectured at, but if you can make them laugh, their defenses are down, and if there’s a truth embedded in that humor, they’ve accepted it for the moment by laughing. And when there’s a large audience, no matter how disparate their background, if they’re laughing together, it’s a unifying moment. But who knows how long that moment of truth or insight will last, for how many members of the audience, and whether knowing it will lead to any action? It’s just one more bit of input, hardly a tipping point.
Besides, the truth is Silly Putty. With the advent of Photoshop and the ability to alter images imperceptibly, the maxim “Pictures don’t l
ie” can now be buried in the Outdated Metaphors Graveyard, along with “That’s like bringing coals to Newcastle” (they finally ran out of coal), and “As good as gold” (for all we know, Fort Knox is currently filled with stacks of Shredded Wheat).
When Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards told a reporter that he had snorted his father’s ashes mixed with cocaine, I believed him. But when he claimed this was only an April Fool’s joke, I believed that too. And when he later said that the real meaning of his statement was “lost in translation”—that he was merely trying to express “how tight” the relationship with his father had been—I also believed that. All three responses were possible. Even probable.
◆ ◆ ◆
Steve Allen once observed,“Comedy is tragedy plus time,” but everything is accelerating. Even the rate of acceleration is accelerating. The time between tragedy and comedy gets shorter and shorter. The more news there is, the more victims there are to serve as set-ups for punch lines.
On the same day that people were being burned alive in the fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, Jay Leno did a joke in his Tonight Show monologue about there being two kinds of cult members there—“regular and crispy.”
(In January 2009, on the same day that a plane crashed into the Hudson River, Leno did jokes about it, but since nobody died, that rendered the accident more acceptable as a source of humor.)
In September 2008—on the same day that the stock market dove 500 points and Hurricane Ike devastated Texas—Stephen Colbert said, “Thank God I have my money stashed on a boat in Galveston.”
In November—ten days after the election resulted in a revocation of the right to same-sex marriage in California, and while the fires in California were becoming increasingly catastrophic—Bill Maher, in his opening monologue on Real Time, acknowledged the seriousness of those spreading flames. I knew it was a straight line, and I cringed with curiosity as to what the punch line might be. “But the fires could’ve been much worse,” said Maher. “Gay people could’ve been married.”