Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  “Bill, listen to me and do exactly what I say,” Lyle advised. “Call Kurtzman in, open the window behind you, and throw him out.”

  “I’m serious,” Gaines said.

  “I’m serious,” Lyle said. “You have no choice here. Fire him now.”

  “If I do, what’ll I do for an editor?”

  “Hire Al Feldstein. He did a good job with Panic.”

  And that’s exactly what Bill Gaines did, although it seemed strange, since Lyle had previously not been speaking to Feldstein. One afternoon, Lyle passed Gaines and Feldstein together in the corridor. He greeted Gaines but ignored the confused Feldstein.

  “Just because Lyle got you the job,” Bill Gaines explained, “don’t expect him to say hello to you.”

  I hadn’t read my first complete book of fiction until I was twenty-one—The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I read it all in one night, identifying so strongly with the adolescent alienation of Holden Caulfield that I wrote a letter to Salinger, asking permission to use his character in a novel I planned to write. He gave the most appropriate response he possibly could—he completely ignored my request. His silence was so eloquent that for years I would continue to cringe with embarrassment at how incredibly naïve I had been.

  Lyle lent me the second novel I read, Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, who had been an unfriendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee. “I shall answer in my own words,” he testified. “Very many questions can be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’ only by a moron or a slave.”

  As a result, he became a victim of the Hollywood blacklist and won an Academy Award for best screenplay under an assumed name. Johnny Got His Gun, originally published in 1939, was about a soldier so severely wounded that, with the aid of modern medical technology, he remained alive but without the senses of sight, hearing, smell, and taste. He had nothing left except the sense of touch and his consciousness. The book had a tremendous impact on me.

  “There’s a whole generation who never even heard of it,” I said to Lyle. “Why don’t you publish a new edition?” Which he did.

  He also lent me Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis. It was about a white man who discovered that he had Negro blood. Lyle felt so strongly about the race issue that when he had been courting Mary Louise, he told her that he was part Negro. She passed the test and they got married.

  They named their first child after me. But then Lyle called me, weeping, “Paul, our baby died.” It was an incredible shock. Little Paul had lived for only six days, and our joy suddenly turned to sadness. There was absolutely nothing I could do except take care of the office while Lyle and Mary Louise went away. When they returned, he gave me the title of managing editor at The Independent.

  The only freelance thing I’d ever sold was an idea to cartoonist Bil Keane, who had a syndicated feature, “Channel Chuckles.” My cartoon showed two kids playing with toy guns. One was saying, “Bang! You’re dead!” The other was saying, “Bang! You’re Channel 2!” I got $5 for that. Then I had an idea that Mad bought. I wrote the script and Wally Wood did the artwork.

  My premise was, “What if comic-strip characters answered those little ads in the back of magazines?” Orphan Annie would get Maybelline for her eyes. Dick Tracy would get a nose job. Alley Oop would get rid of his superfluous hair—only to reveal that he had no ears. But Al Feldstein wouldn’t include Good Old Charlie Brown responding to the “Do You Want Power?” ad, because he didn’t think the Peanuts strip was well known enough yet to parody. Nor would Popeye’s flat-chested girlfriend, Olive Oyl, be permitted to send away for a pair of falsies.

  Bill Gaines said, “My mother would object to that.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “but she’s not a typical subscriber.”

  “No, but she’s a typical mother.”

  His mother would have objected to my final panel, which was also excluded from that spread, depicting a group of comic-strip bachelors—including air force pilot Steve Canyon, Dr. Rex Morgan, and detective Kerry Drake—who had sent for Those Little Comic Books That Men Like and were now all slobbering over these crude drawings of themselves performing sex acts that they were otherwise never allowed to enjoy. I sold a few other ideas to Mad, but when I suggested a satire on the pros and cons of unions, Feldstein wasn’t interested in even seeing it because the subject was “too adult.” Since Mad ’s circulation had already gone over the million mark, Gaines intended to keep aiming the magazine at teenagers.

  “I guess you don’t wanna change horses in midstream,” I said.

  “Not when the horse has a rocket up its ass,” Gaines replied.

  I also sold a few sketches to the Steve Allen show. The first was about “Unsung Heroes of Television”—the one who pushed the isolation booth forward on The $64,000 Question; the one who erased the blackboard on What’s My Line?; and the one who waited for the secret word to be said on You Bet Your Life, then dropped the duck down.

  And I wrote a song lyric, “Cosa Nostra” (“Our Thing”)—a romantic ballad with lines like, “I give you the kiss of death”—for which Steve Allen wrote a bossa nova melody, and he sang it on the show. But when I submitted a sketch making fun of psychiatry, his producer wouldn’t consider it because Steve was going to a psychiatrist at the time.

  Even Lyle Stuart edited me a couple of times at The Independent. I had been writing a new column, “Freedom of Wit.” On one occasion Lyle objected to the use of the word bogeyman because he thought it would be offensive to Negroes. And then I wrote a column analyzing the sick-joke fad. Sample: “Mommy, Mommy, why do I keep walking around in circles?” “Shut up or I’ll nail your other foot to the floor.” But there was one example that Lyle wouldn’t print: “Daddy, Daddy, why do all the other kids call me a queer?” “Shut up and keep sucking.”

  Meanwhile, censorship was becoming a futile process. Ed Sullivan wouldn’t permit the bottom half of Elvis Presley to be seen undulating on his show, but young children across the country were practicing pelvic movements with their hula hoops that would bring a blush to the face of Elvis himself.

  The word greetings had a negative association for me. That’s how the telegram from Selective Service began—greetings—before they told you to report for a physical. You had to register at age eighteen, and they could continue trying to induct you until you were twenty-six. So now I received another notice. The Korean War was over, but the peacetime draft lingered on. Since my own aborted attempt to challenge the Army Loyalty Program, somebody else had tested the law and the Supreme Court declared, 8 to 1, that it was unconstitutional, so now I wouldn’t have to fight to get into the army, but to keep out of it.

  I was determined to avoid the draft. I had a pathological resistance to authority. There was one regulation that every soldier had to keep a package of cigarettes in his inspection kit. What was the message? There are no nonsmokers in foxholes! Do whatever we say! I realized that I would probably end up in the brig for refusing to buy a lousy pack of cigarettes.

  As the date of my army physical approached, my anxiety increased and I developed a nightly ritual of self-mutilation. I would stand in front of the bathroom mirror with a sewing needle, symmetrically gouging holes in the skin on my face and neck. A spiritual practice, I rationalized, strengthening my faith in the healing process. But the blood would flow and I would cry out softly, “I’m making myself ugly!”

  It was an insane activity—I could acknowledge the insanity even while I was carrying it out—but if an aggravated skin condition had kept me out of the army previously, wait till they saw me this time. At my physical, I told the army psychiatrist exactly what I had been doing and why. They classified me 4-F again, reasoning that if I had gone to such an extent to make myself seem crazy, then obviously I must be crazy.

  And they were right—because I continued to expand the scar tissue on my face, like some kind of masochistic junkie. My original self-preserving commitment had turned into a self-destructive compulsion. But one night, while creati
vely mutilating myself, I whispered to the mirror image: “What are you doing? The army already rejected you. This is absurd!” And suddenly I broke through this heavy habituation—stopped—just like that.

  I must have been putting myself into some kind of trance every time I stood in front of that bathroom mirror, tattooing these designs on my face. Decades later I would read in Omni magazine about a study which concluded that cigarette smokers were not addicted to nicotine so much as the endorphins which were produced in response to tissue damage in the throat.

  So even though I had convinced myself that I was participating in some archetypal rite of passage, I had merely gotten hooked on my own endor-phines. But at least it kept me out of the army. My father was not at all pleased. He had been too young to enlist in World War I, but too old to enlist in World War II, and he still maintained a certain disappointment.

  “Do you know what a 4-F means?” he asked. “It means that the army has classified you as physically, mentally, or morally deficient.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  A split had developed in the organization behind a freethought magazine, Progressive World, and Lyle Stuart proposed to the publishers—an elderly couple from whom the publication was, in effect, being stolen—that a lively new freethought magazine should be published, and that it could be launched with their mailing list.

  “With you as the editor,” Lyle told me. “You’ll be perfect.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “You’re the only one I know who’s neurotic enough to do it.”

  America had a powerful tradition of alternative journalism that could be traced back, from contemporary periodicals—The Independent, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, George Seldes’s In Fact—to Brann’s Iconoclast, published in the 1890s in Waco, Texas, all the way back to Benjamin Franklin and Tom Paine during revolutionary times. Now I was being given an opportunity to become part of this tradition. While I was contemplating the possibilities, I read an article in Esquire by Malcolm Muggeridge, former editor of Punch, the British humor magazine. He wrote:The area of life in which ridicule is permissible is steadily shrinking, and a dangerous tendency is becoming manifest to take ourselves with undue seriousness. The enemy of humor is fear and this, alas, is an age of fear. As I see it, the only pleasure of living is that every joke should be made, every thought expressed, every line of investigation, irrespective of its direction, pursued to the uttermost limit that human ingenuity, courage, and understanding can take it.

  The moment that limits are set (other, of course, than those that are inherent in the human situation itself), then the flavor is gone. Humor is an aspect of freedom, without which it cannot exist at all. By its nature, humor is anarchistic, and it may well be that those who seek to suppress or limit laughter are more dangerous than all the subversive conspiracies which the FBI ever has or ever will uncover. Laughter, in fact, is the most effective of all subversive conspiracies, and it operates on our side.

  The article was called “America Needs a Punch,” and I took the implication of that title as my personal marching orders. This was before National Lampoon or Spy magazine, before Doonesbury or Saturday Night Live, Politically Incorrect, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report. I had no role models, and no competition, just an open field mined with taboos waiting to be exploded.

  My goal was to communicate without compromise. My vision was a magazine of “freethought criticism and satire.” Ironically, this concept was a leap of faith—there just had to be others out there who were also the only Martians on their block. If I was the only one, there would be no hope.

  The name of the new magazine was suggested by Fred Wortman, a columnist for Progressive World. He was the personification of an old-fashioned village atheist. He wrote thoughtful, provocative, witty letters to the editor of his local paper in Albany, Georgia, cured himself of cancer with a grape diet, and was ecologically ahead of his time—instead of throwing away a used typewriter ribbon, he would re-ink it himself. Wortman wrote to me that The Realist might be a good name, and I recognized immediately that it was the appropriate one.

  So there I was—the editor of The Realist. Now all I needed was a magazine.

  I found a quote from Groucho Marx: “Satire is verboten today. The restrictions—political, religious, and every other kind—have killed satire.”

  Then I began contacting writers and cartoonists, exchanging ideas and giving assignments, hoping to help bring satire back to life. I started with John Putnam, the art director at Mad. He designed The Realist logo, and also wrote the first column, “Modest Proposals,” bylined John Francis Putnam. Although Mad staffers were not allowed to have any outside projects, Putnam was willing to risk his job to write for The Realist. Bill Gaines appreciated that and made an exception for him.

  And then, late one extremely hot night in the spring of 1958, alone and literally naked, I was sitting at my desk in Lyle Stuart’s office, preparing final copy for the first issue, to be dated June. In my opening editorial, I wrote: I am nonpartisan in that I’m not a Democrat or a Republican or a Vegetarian. Not a Communist or a Fascist or a Prohibitionist. Not a socialist or a capitalist or an anarchist. Not a liberal or a conservative or a vivisectionist. Not Catholic or Protestant or Jewish. Not Unitarian or Buddhist or Existentialist. Not hip or square or round. Not even an American—in the sense that, as one book reviewer puts it, to call a man a South African just because he was born in South Africa is like calling a kitten a biscuit because it was born in an oven.

  I was supposed to have everything ready for the printer the next morning. I felt exhausted, but there was one final piece to write. My bare buttocks stuck to the leather chair as I borrowed a satirical form from Mad and composed:A CHILD’S PRIMER ON TELETHONS

  See the tired man. He has been up all night. He is running a telethon. He wants the people to send money. It is for leukemia. That is a disease. Little children like you can catch it. Evil.

  See the sexy girl. She is a singer. She doesn’t know whether the telethon is for leukemia or dystrophy or gonorrhea. Her agent got her the booking. She needs the exposure. Notice her cleavage.

  See the handsome man. He does know that it’s for leukemia. You can tell. He is singing a calypso melody. Listen to the lyrics. “Give-your-money,” he sings, “to-leukemia. Give-your-money, to-leukemia.” Listen to the audience applaud. He is very talented.

  See the sincere politician. He is running for reelection in November. He is against leukemia. He is willing to take an oath against it. That proves he is against it.

  See the wealthy businessman. He is making a donation. He wants his company’s name mentioned. Then we can buy his product. Then he will make profits. Then he can make another donation next year.

  See the little boy. He has leukemia. Too bad for him. The nice lady is holding him up to the TV camera. Aren’t you glad it’s not you? But wouldn’t you like to be on TV? Maybe you can fall down a well.

  See the fancy scoreboard. It tells how much money they get. They want a million dollars. Uncle Sam has many millions of dollars. He cuts medical research funds by more than seven million dollars. Why? Because he needs the money for more important things.

  See the mushroom cloud. That costs lots of money. It has loads of particles. They cause leukemia. Money might help to find a cure. That is why we have telethons.

  See the tired man.

  Steve Allen became the first subscriber to The Realist. He sent in several gift subscriptions, including one for controversial comedian Lenny Bruce, who in turn sent in gift subscriptions for several others. From this momentum the satirical wing of my readership would spread. And, out of three thousand Progressive World readers, six hundred subscribed to The Realist.

  That was the freethought wing. Edwin Wilson, director of the American Humanist Association, wrote in Free Mind:Those two facets of The Realist seem to complement each other. The social concern may prevent such nihilistic negativism as Ambrose Bierce represented. The humor, biting as it ma
y be, may protect the polemics of the magazine from that complete certainty of an earlier type of reformer who was sure that by his deed the world assuredly would be saved.

  The Realist had struck some kind of transcendent nerve. I heard from the Fortean Society and the Libertarian League, from psychics and secularists. Satirical troubadour Tom Lehrer wrote, “I anticipate, things being the way they are, that the magazine will expire before my subscription does, but I’ll take my chances.” And Charles Carver, author of Brann and the Iconoclast, wrote, “I am certain Brann would have relished The Realist. May the publication thrive!” The cover of his book had an illustration of Brann being shot in the back with a rifle. All I wanted to do was make people laugh.

  The religious climate of the day was revealed by a stripteaser named Norma. Vincent Peel, and by evangelist Billy Graham telling a legislative committee that any censorship bill should “state just what parts of the female body must be covered in printed pictures.” By the University of Colorado refusing to give campus status to the Student Committee for Freedom of Religious Dissent. And by the director of the National Catholic Welfare Conference suggesting that the human race find another planet rather than limit its population by birth control. Which inspired another child’s primer for The Realist: SEX EDUCATION FOR THE MODERN CATHOLIC CHILD

  This is a diaphragm. Women use it when they don’t want to have a baby. That is very immoral. Why, you ask? Because it is artificial, that’s why. But never fear. There are other methods to prevent conception. They are very moral. Why, you ask? Because they are natural, that’s why.