REFLECTIONS OF A REALIST
PAUL KRASSNER INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON
Your first gig was with Mad magazine, right? How did that come about?
Actually, my first gig was when I was a kid working in a grocery store, separating cherries with green mold from the plain red ones. It was a kind of meditation. In my last year of college, I began working for The Independent, an anti-censorship paper, where I eventually became managing editor. The publisher, Lyle Stuart, was friends with Bill Gaines, the publisher of Mad, and when Gaines hired Stuart as his business manager, we moved our office downtown to what was unofficially known as “the Mad building.”
I wasn’t on the staff of Mad, but I wrote some scripts on a freelance basis. The premise of my first submission was “What if comic-strip characters answered those little ads in the back of magazines?” But the editor—Al Feldstein, who replaced Harvey Kurtzman—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.”
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.
At that time, there was no satirical magazine for grown-ups—like Punch in England or Krokodil in the Soviet Union or Oz in Australia—and so when I launched The Realist in 1958, I didn’t have any competition. But I also had no role models for such a magazine. I just made it up as I went along.
Was the success of The Realist a surprise?
Yeah, absolutely. I thought it might reach a thousand circulation. And when it did, then I hoped it might reach three thousand. In two years, it did. Later, five thousand. Then ten thousand. Then twenty-five. Then fifty thousand. In 1967, the circulation peaked at a hundred thousand. And the pass-on readership was estimated at two million. But who really knows how many?
In any case, the readers had in common a sense of irreverence toward piety and pomposity. My credo was to communicate without compromise. I had no publisher or advertisers to answer to. The subscribers and newsstand buyers trusted me not to be afraid of offending them. And their urge to share fueled that Malthusian growth of The Realist. Word-of-mouth was the best kind of advertising and it was free.
Is there anything in your view that replaces The Realist today?
Well, because The Realist was personal, unique, originally published in the context of a blossoming counterculture, and undermined by the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program), I say with all the false humility I can muster that nothing can replace The Realist. As for satirical publications, there’s been National Lampoon and Spy magazine. And later, published in cyberspace, The Onion, The Borowitz Report, and Ironic Times. Incidentally, all issues of The Realist are now online at The Realist Archive Project. Meanwhile, irreverence has become an industry.
Ever meet Lord Buckley?
Nope. However, when I moved from New York to San Francisco in 1971 to coedit with Ken Kesey The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, I also hosted my own radio program on ABC’s FM station. My first appearance was on the morning of Easter Sunday, so I opened with Lord Buckley’s classic jazzed-up performance of The Nazz (that’s short for Nazarene).
Have you ever taught comedy? Like in college? Has anybody?
The closest I’ve come to that was in the ’60s when I taught a course at the Free University in New York. It was titled “Journalism and Satire: How to Tell the Difference.” There are teachers of comedy now. Perhaps the best is Beth Lapides. I call her the mother of alternative comedy.
What do you think of WikiLeaks?
Well, let me put it this way: I trust WikiLeaks more than Wikipedia. I consider whistleblowers like Julian Assange, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, and Edward Snowden to be heroic figures on an international level. In the ’60s, we wore buttons that said No Secrets and we carried posters that proclaimed Information Is Free.
Now, WikiLeaks has been transmutating those abstract ideas into worldwide public scrutiny of clandestine communications, ranging from embarrassing quotes to the revelation of international criminality. Here’s an example: The Yemeni president covered up United States drone strikes against al-Qaeda in Yemen. He told General David Petraeus in a diplomatic cable, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours”—sort of like vice-presidential candidate John Edwards’s assistant claiming to be the father of a baby when actually it was Edwards himself who had impregnated his mistress.
It looks like pot is gradually getting legalized. Does this please you or dismay you?
It pleases my ass off. I mean, why would it dismay me? It dismays the DEA and the prison guards’ union. It even dismays some growers, dealers, and medical marijuana dispensaries. In a truly free society, the distinction of whether marijuana is used for medical or recreational purposes would be as irrelevant an excuse for discrimination as whether the sexual preference of gays and lesbians is innate or a matter of choice.
It dismays the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, which was originally founded and funded by the pharmaceutical industry, the alcohol industry, and the tobacco industry. Cigarettes are legal and kill 1,300 people every day—and that’s just in this country—but marijuana is still mostly illegal, yet the worst that can happen is maybe you’ll get a severe case of the blind munchies and eat a bunch of legal junk food.
What does dismay me, though, is that as long as any government can arbitrarily decide which drugs are legal and which are illegal, then anyone serving time for a nonviolent drug offense is a political prisoner. So, even though Colorado and Washington are the first two states to legalize recreational marijuana, I won’t be satisfied until amnesty is declared, freeing all those stoners who are still living behind bars.
Incidentally, there was a questionnaire that was published in High Times, and one of the questions was, “Is it possible to smoke too much pot?” And a reader answered, “I don’t understand the question.”
Seems to me that American humor, at least since the fifties, is primarily Jewish. I mean from Milton Berle to Sid Caesar to Lenny Bruce to, hell, Jon Stewart. Not to mention Paul Krassner. What’s the deal with that?
First of all, I don’t think of myself as Jewish. My parents were, but I consider all religions to be organized superstition. Ironically, anyone who thinks of Judaism as a race rather than a religion is accepting Nazi tenets. I don’t believe that Jews were the chosen people, or that humans were the chosen species. If that darned asteroid hadn’t rendered all those dinosaurs extinct, would creationists be driving around only in cars fueled by batteries? But although I’m an atheist, I welcome diversity, as long as no theological dogma is allowed to become a law.
Anyway, sure, there was some truth to the stereotype of Jewish comedians, but that’s changed. Steve Allen wasn’t Jewish. George Carlin wasn’t. Richard Pryor wasn’t. Chris Rock isn’t. Margaret Cho isn’t. Conan O’Brien isn’t. Louis C.K. was raised as a Catholic but is now an agnostic. Bill Maher is also an agnostic—his father was Catholic, and Bill was a teenager when he learned that his mother was Jewish. Stephen Colbert is a practicing Catholic, and he teaches Sunday School. As for me, I’ve had my foreskin sewn back on my penis.
Does that still hurt?
Only when I come.
You once described the Diggers as a cross between Mother Teresa and Tim Leary. Was that supposed to be a complime
nt?
I guess so. They served as social workers for the Haight-Ashbury community in San Francisco, and they took acid trips.
What do you think of hip-hop?
Besides passion and talent in show biz, I think of the hip-hop community as part of the ever-evolving counterculture. In the past several decades, we’ve gone from bohemians to Beats, from hippies to Yippies, from punk to hip-hop—it’s essentially the same spirit continuing in different forms.
Ever been attacked by wild animals?
Only by cops swinging billy clubs and howling triumphantly.
Ever meet Woody Allen?
I interviewed him for The Realist in 1965. We concluded:
Q. Are you concerned about the population explosion?
A. No, I’m not. I mean, I recognize it as a problem which those who like that area can fool around with. I doubt if there’s anything I can do about the population explosion, or about the atom bomb, besides vote when the time comes, and I contribute money to those organizations who spend their days in active pursuit of ends that I’m in agreement with. But that’s all. And I’m not going to set fire to myself.
Q. But do you agree with the motivation of the Buddhist monks who set fire to themselves in Vietnam?
A. I don’t think so. No, I think that they don’t know what they’re doing. I think they’re nuts. That’s not the answer. When all is said and done, it’s not the answer. When you’re home at night and you say to yourself, “Tomorrow morning I’ll get up at eight o’clock and set fire to myself,” there’s something wrong. I wouldn’t do it that way.
I can see dying for a principle, but not that way. At the very minimum, if you are going to die for something, you should at least take one of them with you. Go back to the Jews in Germany. If you have a loaded gun in your home, and the state comes to get you, you can at least get two or three of them.
I’m not opposed to violence as a course of action in many instances. Sometimes passive resistance is fine, but violence in its place is a good and necessary thing. But setting fire to yourself is not the answer. With my luck, I would be un-inflammable.
My Jeopardy answer: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” You provide the question.
Why did you stop beating your wife?
Watch any TV?
Less and less. Let’s see … Bill Maher. The Simpsons. Sixty Minutes. Louie. Occasional movies or documentaries. If Curb Your Enthusiasm were still on, I’d watch. So, instead of Larry David, I watch Seinfeld reruns, despite the annoying laugh-track. I watch Rachel Maddow. I watch the real news and the fake news as they borrow clips from each other.
How come you have never hosted the Oscars?
Their invitation must’ve gotten lost by the Post Office.
Each in one sentence please: Sarah Silverman, Sarah Palin, Thelonious Monk, Andy Warhol.
Sarah Silverman confessed her bedwetting trauma without the aid of a priest. When Sarah Palin was chosen as John McCain’s running mate, and CBS interviewed her at home, a member of the crew told me that he saw the potential vice president remove from a shelf a book about seceding from the United States. I once interviewed Thelonious Monk for Playboy, and I was tempted to call him Felonious, but I figured that he’d already heard that too many times.
A few decades after Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol in 1968, his cohort, Paul Morrissey, said in an interview by Taylor Mead (who had played himself in Warhol’s film, Taylor Mead’s Ass, described in Wikipedia as a “sixty-minute opus that consisted entirely of Taylor Mead’s ass, during which Mead first exhibits a variety of movement, then appears to shove a variety of objects up his ass”) that “Solanas approached underground newspaper publisher Paul Krassner for money, saying, ‘I want to shoot [Olympia Press publisher] Maurice Girodias,’ and he gave her $50, enough for a .32 automatic pistol,” which, of course, Paul Morrissey shoved up Taylor Mead’s ass.
What’s your favorite gadget?
You mean like my drone that delivers the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos? Or my invention of a combination dildo and anti-insomnia gadget called Dildoze? Actually, I like my answering machine, because I can screen all my calls. And as a result, telemarketers—whether they’re humans or robots—automatically hang up. If a gadget doesn’t have to have moving parts, then I say yay for my back-scratcher.
Was there anyone in the ’60s counterculture you didn’t meet? What would you say to them today?
Yeah, there were millions of ’em. At the risk of revealing my self-serving streak, I would recommend to them my own memoir (available at paulkrassner.com), Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture, about which Pulitzer Prize winner Art Spiegelman wrote that “His true wacky, wackily true autobiography is the definitive book on the sixties.” Oops, wait, you must mean famous countercultural icons. Well, I would’ve liked to meet Mario Savio. He gave that passionate speech in 1964, outdoors on the steps of Sproul Hall at the UC—Berkeley campus: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!”
Today I would say to him, “Thanks for inspiring the Free Speech Movement.”
I would’ve also liked to meet Janis Joplin. Actually, I sort of did, but not really. We were both performing in a benefit at the Fillmore East. While I was onstage in the middle of an anecdote, she was walking toward the exit doors, and she was wearing anklets with these bells that rang all the way up the aisle. Later, hurrying out of the theater, she saw me in the lobby. “Hey, I’m sorry about my cowbells,” she said, “but I hadda take a leak.”
“Oh, that’s okay, but ain’t it better to give then to take?” She cackled and left the building. Today I would say to her, “Belated thanks for your empathy.”
Have you ever been tempted to fake your death so you could read your New York Times obit?
That wouldn’t be necessary, because NPR already has one in the can, and the radio journalist who did it sent me a CD, so I had the rare privilege of fact-checking my own obituary. And recently an AP correspondent was also assigned to prepare my obit. So now I can sign my books with this inscription: “This book will be worth more on eBay when I’m dead.”
Three favorite movies?
Network. Sophie’s Choice. The Night Porter. And a fourth: The Producers. Hmmm. There’s a pattern there. Those last three were about Nazi Germany, and the first one was about creeping fascism in America.
Ever read science fiction?
Theodore Sturgeon: We became friends, and he wrote a column for The Realist. And when I was at Hustler, I appointed him as our book reviewer.
Harlan Ellison: We also became friends, and he wrote an introduction to my anthology, Pot Stories for the Soul: An Updated Edition for a Stoned America. “Basically, fuck dope,” he began. “No offense, dude, but fuck dope.”
Octavia Butler: My wife Nancy and I were seated at the same dinner table with her at a literary event, and discussing fiction, she offered a fine bit of advice on finding things to like about an evil character.
You were once the centerfold in Hustler magazine. Any plans for a repeat?
It’s not on my to-do list. In 1978, after Larry Flynt had converted to Christianity, he hired me to mesh porn and religion. I suggested a scratch-’n’-sniff centerfold of the Virgin Mary. “That’s a great idea,” he said. “We’ll have a portrait of the Virgin Mary, and when you scratch the spot, it’ll smell like tomato juice.” Anyway, I was completely naked except for wearing my old cowboy hat in the photo you’re referring to. It accompanied an interview in Hustler’s first born-again issue.
You once took LSD with Groucho Marx. So what?
You had to be there.
But okay, I’ll give you a snippet of the trip. Groucho told me about one of his favorite contestants on You Bet Your Life: “He was an elderly gentleman with white hair, but quite a chipper fellow. I asked him what he did to retain his sunny disposition. ‘Well, I’ll tell you, Groucho,’ he says, ‘every morning I get up and I make a choice to be happy that day.’” Then he went to urinate. When he came back, he said, “You know, everybody is waiting for miracles to happen. But the whole human body is a goddamn miracle.
Do you regard yourself as a journalist or a satirist?
Both, though I label myself as an investigative satirist. Currently, I’m working on my long-awaited—by me, anyway—first novel, about a contemporary Lenny Bruce–type performer.
Imbedded in your journalism career are two serious crusades: for abortion rights and against cigarettes. Any progress?
In 1962, when abortions were considered a crime, I never thought they would be legalized in my lifetime. After I had published an interview with Dr. Robert Spencer, without identifying him, I began to get calls from women who were pregnant but didn’t want to be, and I became an underground abortion referral service, and in the process, morphing from a satirist to an activist. I was subpoenaed by district attorneys in two cities, but I refused to testify before their grand juries. Then came Roe vs. Wade, and I never thought that abortions would become a crime again in my lifetime, but now it seems like a possibility, one state at a time. States’ rights aren’t just for racists any more.
As for cigarettes, in January 2014, the Los Angeles Times published my letter to the editor:
Re “Smoking’s global grip,” Opinion, Jan. 21. Thomas J. Bollyky writes the following: “Step by step, the government cracked down on tobacco. Warning labels were added to cigarette packages (1965), cigarette advertising was banned on television and radio (1971), smoking on commercial airline flights was forbidden (1987), and tobacco products were put under Food and Drug Administration oversight (2009)…. U.S. criminal and civil tobacco lawsuits exposed and punished tobacco companies for decades of obfuscation and malfeasance.”
Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders Page 8