“Well,” I began, “Allen Ginsberg is very disappointed. He thought that Karen Finley was gonna shove a sweet potato up his ass.”
The laughter of the audience was like an explosion of sweet music. We connected immediately. I felt a rush of security. I started talking about the Reagan administration: “For nearly eight years we’ve had an after-dinner speaker in the White House.” This was intended as a simple throwaway transition line, but to my surprise the audience applauded. That image must have struck a raw nerve. Then I conducted an imaginary press conference:
“Mr. President, members of the Secret Service have been caught doing dope.”
“Well, that just goes to show how far the problem extends.”
“Mr. President, the Pentagon is involved in a terrible bribery scandal.”
“Well, there are a few rotten apples in every barrel.”
“Mr. President, the U.S. Navy has shot down an Iranian plane and killed 190 innocent civilians.”
“Well, that was a wrongful accident.”
To which I added, “There used to be a sign on the desk in the Oval Office that said the buck stops here. Now it’s been changed to a sign that says shit happens.”
It was really working—and when it really works, it’s like surfing on waves of laughter. Outside Lincoln Center, I was confronted by a real-life version of the character, Rupert Pukin, played by Robert De Niro in King of Comedy. This fellow kept telling me jokes, one after another. He said, “Here’s my card,” and he handed me a card that read My Card. “You wanna see my pride and joy?” This time the card had photos of two products, Pride (furniture wax) and Joy (dishwashing liquid).
“I’ve gotta leave now,” I told him, “but if we ever meet again, let’s see if we can relate to each other without telling a single joke.”
He hesitated a split second, then took on the demeanor of Curly from the Three Stooges, exaggeratedly twirled his index finger in the air, and said, “Why, soitanly!”
And we both laughed. It was our first real contact.
America was hungry for spontaneity. Michael Dukakis lost his debate with George Bush because of the non-spontaneity of his answer to the first question posed by CNN’s Bernard Shaw: “If your wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered, how would you feel about the death penalty?” The answer seemed extremely impersonal.
Two days before the final debate, I got a call from Dukakis headquarters in search of jokes, “self-deprecating one-liners,” that Dukakis could use. At the time, he was being criticized for the pollution of Boston Harbor. “At some point during the debate,” I suggested, “Dukakis could say, ‘If what Mr. Bush says is true, I’ll go swimming in Boston Harbor.’” But that was a trifle too self-deprecating. “Okay, then, how about, ‘I’ll walk across Boston Harbor?’” But that was too self-laudatory.
On the day of the debate, Dukakis headquarters phoned again. “Let me emphasize,” the caller added, “we’re desperate.” This time I suggested that Dukakis say, “Mr. Bush keeps saying that I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU, but I’m a dyslexic, and I thought he was accusing me of being a card-carrying member of UCLA.” Not only was that too local a joke, but apparently they didn’t want to take a chance on offending the dyslexic vote, not realizing that to a dyslexic a vote for Bush would be a vote for Dukakis.
The only one-liner that Dukakis actually used in the final debate was “a flexible freeze [a phrase Bush used]—that sounds like an economic Slurpie.” It fit right in with a presidential campaign of easily recognizable pop-culture references: Dukakis calling Bush “the Joe Isuzu of politics”—he was TV car salesman—Arnold Schwarzenegger belittling Dukakis as Pee-Wee Herman, Bush referring one day to the popular sitcom Thirtysomething and the next day referring to Vanna White from Wheel of Fortune as “Vanna,” thereby perpetuating his delusions of intimacy.
In the summer of 1991, Friends producer Kevin Bright hired me as a writer on “The Ron Reagan Show,” seemingly an ironic association in view of the kind of material I had done about his father in The Realist and onstage—plus, High Times had just published my fake interview with Nancy Reagan, in which she admitted that she’d had an affair, not only with Frank Sinatra but also with L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates.
However, young Ron was a fellow cultural mutation, and he understood that I was treating his parents as political symbols. I had met Ron’s sister, Patti Davis, ten years previously, when their father was still president. A San Francisco district attorney had taken a few folks out on his sailboat. I told her, “I really respected your decision to appear at that anti-nuke rally.”
“I was doing that before my father was president,” she said. “I have to do it. I’m serious about that. It’s the planet.” This was a logical extension of the time Graham Nash told Patti that she had a cute ass for a president’s daughter, and she responded, “I had a cute ass before I was the president’s daughter.” Patti’s Secret Service guards had been at the anti-nuke rally, but they didn’t come sailing with us. “I wanted to take a stand,” she said, “by having all female Secret Service guards, but there’s very few of them.”
Now, at lunch, a restaurant hostess shook hands with Ron Reagan and said, “I thought it was really cool for your sister to talk about masturbation in Vanity Fair.”
My friend from Wilton North, Lane Sarasohn, was the other writer on this show, and he drove me to work every day. One morning, I noticed a bumper sticker that said subvert the dominant paradigm, which I mentioned to Ron, and he adopted it as the show’s unspoken credo.
We decided to defuse the fact that he was the son of the former president, in a promo which included a recent clip of Ron as host of Evening at the Improv, saying, “I am the love child of Frank Sinatra”—followed immediately by an old black-and-white film clip of Ronald Reagan saying, “Can you imagine what the Commies will do with this!”
But Fox head Barry Diller happened to be watching TV at home. He felt that the promo was exploitative and yanked it off the air.
I told Ron that he had been falsely outed by militant gays in New York. We knew that issue was bound to enter the dialogue on an upcoming program about gay rights, so he was prepared. “I was a ballet dancer,” he said on the show, “and any straight ballet dancer gets a rather thick skin about this sort of thing. But it occurred to me that it’s insulting to my wife of eleven years, because it says she’s living a lie, and I don’t like that.”
Ron Reagan had a charming sense of irreverence. In the conference room, we were watching a clip from the movie Rapture, which was to be included on a show about religion.
“I met a guy,” Mimi Rogers is telling her husband. “You should meet him. You could love him too.”
“You fell for some rich homosexual,” the husband says, laughing.
“He’s the Lord Jesus Christ.”
“And,” Ron added, “he’s hung like a stallion.”
On another show, about television, one of the panelists, Chris Albrecht, the producer of Roc, a sitcom about a black garbage collector, described the character as “middle class.”
I whispered to Lane, “Doesn’t he mean working class?”
“From his point of view, anybody who has a job is middle class.”
“That must mean that working class is anybody who’s waiting on the unemployment line.”
“The Ron Reagan Show” was not renewed, and a few weeks later, Lane and I found ourselves waiting on the unemployment line.
I turned down invitations to audition for roles in a couple of situation comedies. On What a Dummy, I could have auditioned for the part of a disc jockey stuck in the sixties who wears platform shoes and plays Peter, Paul and Mary records backward, but I didn’t want to perpetuate that kind of stereotype.
And on the new Mary Tyler Moore show, I could have auditioned for the part of a man who kills a cable TV repairman because he can’t get a clear picture on his TV set—he says, “All I wanted to do was watch Tic-Tac-Dough without ghosts”—but I didn’t want to contribute
one iota to the notion of casual violence as a solution to problems, especially with a laugh track to hide the propaganda.
I was spoiled. I had gotten used to speaking my own words. So it was back to stand-up comedy again. Instead of appearing at comedy clubs, my venues varied—from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, where subliminal learning tapes were debunked and psychics were denounced, to the New Age Renaissance Fair, where subliminal learning tapes were sold and psychics could read everything from your palm to chicken bones; from an art gallery to the Brentwood Bakery, where chairs were set up and audience members were each given a free pastry of their choice; from a conference sponsored by the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, where I learned a new oxymoron, “codependency support group,” to a fundraiser for openly gay Tom Ammiano’s campaign for San Francisco supervisor, at a gay cabaret, where a few callers wanted to know if I was gay.
“Krassner isn’t gay,” the manager told them, “but he is queer.”
Ammiano, later a California assemblyman, would introduce a bill not only to address the state’s economic crisis, but also to begin a discussion about how best to regulate its largest cash crop, marijuana, which brings in $14 billion a year.
“The best scenario,” he told me, “would make it a states’ rights issue, but in the meantime California’s out of the gate early. ‘Oh, but federal law pre-empts it.’ Well, I’ve got to be candid here. Since when has San Francisco given a fuck about that?”
“States’ rights,” I said. “It’s not just for racists anymore.”
Flapping my arms like wings to determine the difference between the news and dreaming had become the signature of my performances. At the Hundredth Monkey Project to Stop Nuclear Testing, I talked about insane priorities and what is considered sane:In the recent trial of Jeffrey Dahmer—you know, that serial killer who dismembered and cannibalized his victims—the final witness for the prosecution was a psychiatrist who testified that Dahmer was sane because he wore condoms when he had intercourse with those corpses. I did this [flapping my arms] for that one. But here’s my public service announcement: “If Jeffrey Dahmer is sane enough to have safe sex, what about you?”
And, at another event, in Minneapolis, “Early Warnings: Media and the Environment,” sponsored by the Utne Reader:
I’m not sure why, at this stage of the game, with the state of the earth, why this conference is being called Early Warnings. I guess maybe that means that Rachel Carson and others, a couple of decades ago, were merely indulging in premature ejaculations. The New Age movement has really come a long way since there was originally a cult of seven hippies who derived their entire theology from Celestial Seasonings tea bag boxes. And then it expanded, they got into colonics, which is an enema with an ideology.
And there’s a whole industry now, there are companies that do nothing but produce New Age music, which is sort of like Muzak, but without the melody. We’re all environmental journalists who have that New Age sensibility now. People don’t say, “This is off the record.” They just say, “Look, I’m feeling very vulnerable.” But I want to give you something very practical to take back—a way to tell the difference between the news and dreaming—because it’s getting more and more difficult—you know, there’s so much imagery.
So you flap your arms like wings, then if you see something in the news, like they’re not gonna spray malathion on some field because there’s a rat there that’s an endangered species, you just go like this [flapping my arms], and if you fly, then you know you’re dreaming. The first time I tried this was when I read that Bob Dylan had become a born-again Christian.
I thought, Wait a minute, here’s a guy who sang about don’t follow leaders, and now he’s chosen one. I flapped my arms like this and I remained stationary, so I knew it was a true news item, that Dylan had actually become a born-again Christian. Of course, now he’s going to back to his Hebraic roots. He’s currently in a halfway house for secular humanism.
It was at this conference that I had an epiphany. I met a man who owns a ranch in Australia. He told me about an Aborigine child he knew who slept on a bed made of leaves and twigs, but he went to a school where they had two computers, run by a generator. This Aborigine child had already broken the code at MIT, and his next target would be the Pentagon.
CHAPTER 13
PRANKS FOR THE MEMORIES
One night in 1968, still in New York, Steve Post asked me to guest-host his radio show. At the time, a mass student strike was going on at Columbia University, so Marshall Efron, Bridget Potter, and I pretended that we were Columbia students who had taken over WBAI.
We used code names—Rudi Dutschke, Emma Goldman, and Danny the Red. In nasal tones, I explained that we were all taking a course in alternative media, that our assignment was either to write a term paper or participate in an activity, and that we had decided to take over a radio station for credit.
“The airwaves belong to the people,” we chanted.
We had planned to carry on this hoax for fifteen minutes, but it lasted four hours. KNBC in San Francisco and several other stations put us on the air, live. Local listeners called the police, but when they arrived we told them it was a put-on. Then, after they left, I went on the air again, snickering as I described the way we had fooled the cops. And they came again.
When I moved to California, I took along my Donald Duck with eight arms (Shiva Duck, also known as Donald Sutra), and there it stood on the mantel over the fireplace at my home in Watsonville. But on this particular day, there was something vaguely different about it.
Then I realized what it was—he had ten arms now.
The additional arms were actually two pairs of shoelaces. Ken Kesey had been around. He had bought a pair of shoelaces for himself, but they only came in packages of three.
While visiting New York, I was a guest of Yoko Ono and John Lennon for the celebration of Yoko’s show, This Is Not Here, at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. I found myself sitting on the floor in a large room where Ringo Starr led a large group of friends and associates singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” with each individual singing the chorus. When it was my turn, I sang, “She’s got the whole world in her hands . . .”
Later, I was about to enter an even larger room, which was quite crowded. As I walked through the doorway, Phil Spector stood up at the far side of the room, pointed at me, and shouted, “You killed Lenny Bruce!” I was stunned. Rather than ratchet up the sour vibe that Spector had created, I turned around and left. John and Yoko ran after me, apologizing profusely for Spector’s insane outburst.
A couple of years later, at the A&M recording studio, he pointed a gun at Lennon, chasing him through the corridors.
In August 1974, Variety reported: “John F. Kennedy will be impersonated in a play, with Vaughn Meader in the lead. Meader hasn’t played the Kennedy role since the assassination.”
Two days later, Richard Nixon became the first president in American history to resign from office, and Lenny Bruce whistled from the grave, “Whew! David Frye is screwed again!”
Chic magazine assigned me to write “A Sneak Preview of Richard Nixon’s Memoir.” I had a poster of him on the wall for inspiration. There was this scene between Nixon and his chief of staff:I stood up, and walked around my desk to where Haldeman was sitting. I ran my hand back and forth over the top of his crew cut.
I am not very physically demonstrative, but I had always wanted to do that. Still, for me, this was almost a spontaneous gesture.
“You stuck by me, Bob,” I said. I suddenly began weeping uncontrollably.
“Sir—is there anything I can do?”
Between sobs I blurted out, “Oh, sure”—and I certainly did not intend for this to be taken literally—“why don’t you try sucking my cock, maybe that’ll help.”
To my utter astonishment, Haldeman unzipped my fly and proceeded to do exactly what I had facetiously suggested, with what can only be describ
ed as extreme efficiency. He must have had some practice during his old prep school days. But neither of us said a word—before, during, or after.
It occurred to me that this misunderstanding was comparable to the time that Jeb Magruder remarked how convenient it would be if we could get rid of Jack Anderson, and G. Gordon Liddy assumed this was a direct order and rushed out to accomplish the act. If Liddy had not blabbed his “assignment” to an aide in the corridor, Anderson might not be alive today.
As for my own motivation, here was an experience, not of homosexuality but of power. I realized that if I could order the Pentagon to bomb Cambodia, it was of no great consequence that I was now merely permitting my chief of staff to perform fellatio on me. In fact, I was fully cognizant of what an honor it must have been for him.
When the incident was over, I simply returned to my desk and, although the tension of vulnerability was still in the air, we resumed our discussion as if nothing had occurred.
“Now,” I said in a normal tone of voice, “what’s on the agenda?”
Was my sneak preview of Richard Nixon’s memoir an example of what Ram Dass had labeled “astral humor”? Liz Smith wrote in her syndicated column that Haldeman had been in the Oval Office with Nixon, and that his trousers were down to his ankles.
Hoping to smoke out the truth, I retyped one page of the manuscript, adding a phrase (shown in italics) to this sentence in the former president’s memoir: “When the incident was over, I simply returned to my desk and, although the tension of vulnerability was still in the air and my trousers were still around my ankles, we resumed our discussion as if nothing had occurred.” Then I photocopied the manuscript and sent it to Liz Smith.
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