Paul Krassner.

• Author: Kupfer, David
• Position: Journalist - Interview

Paul Krassner, who coined the term Yippie, co-founded the Yippies with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rub as a way of injecting humor into the youth movement and overcoming the police pressure of that time. as a way to force people to acknowledge and in some way deal with the truth, Krassner has been in th of irreverence and political satire since the late 1950s. His publication, The Realist, has been, in traveler Wavy Gravy, the official organ of the underground counterculture for more than thirty years comedian, and social activist, Krassner has tackled many issues, while skirting the law as well as g

The Realist was the forerunner of the underground press of the 1960s. Krassner was ahead of the pack, breaking stories and addressing issues that were taboo for the Establishment. He pushed at the margin. Ed Sanders, co-founder of the Fugs, says Krassner "interlaced current events with culture and politics in a manner not previously done. Paul reminded us that without laughter and good times, why have a revolution? He was always on the side of personal freedom and personal destiny. Paul dared to be a part of the history of his era."

Krassner's autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture, was published by Simon & Schuster in September.

Q: What role has The Realist played in helping to "out" opposition to the status quo?

Paul Krassner: It was both a chronicler of the counterculture and an influence on it. But underneath that, it had this sense of irreverence. It made people laugh. Humor is a way of holding up a mirror to the society--and society was boring. It was not adventurous. And there was a large difference between what people experienced and the way it was reported in the press, which was one of the things that nurtured the rise of the alternative press, that difference.

Q: Why were you considered a threat to the system?

Krassner: Well, a threat is like obscenity or humor: It's always in the eye of the beholder. I guess, judging by my FBI files, that anything that was opposed to the status quo was considered a threat to the system, and The Realist was a vehicle for voices opposing the status quo. So it's a control thing. The Realist essentially represented anti-control, anti-authority. They just don't like anybody to rock the boat.

Q: In terms of your childhood or your upbringing, where was your desire to oppose the status quo born?

Krassner: When I was a kid, the first movie I saw was Intermezzo. I told my violin teacher that I wanted to learn the theme song from Intermezzo, and he said, "That's not right for you." It was like a declaration of war, and I could just see how people liked to control what other people did, decide for them what was appropriate.

The Realist was a voice of individuality--especially when it started in the late 1950s, coming out of the McCarthy Era and the Silent Generation. The most common response was, "It's a breath of fresh air and it makes me realize that I'm not insane," or "I am insane but at least there's company." Now these people knew they weren't the only ones.

Q: What's the state of irreverence today in America?

Krassner: It's an industry. You can probably buy stock in it. Often it's irreverence for its own sake, which I guess is OK. It's not for anybody--not for me--to say what somebody else's limits should be. But I'd rather have too much irreverence than not enough. So I think it's healthy. There's still a lot of reverence for cliches, unfortunately, and people--what was the statistic I read--22 per cent of the American population believe that the Holocaust was a hoax. I hear something like that, and that kind of irreverence scares me, irreverence toward the truth and toward history. But that's the risk of freedom: irreverence toward historical tragic truth.

Q: You've been able to inject a lot of humor into our political system.

Krassner: I just look at the political system and then report on it. The humor's already there. Sometimes it's just pointing out things. I've used humor to make a point, to say the truth, doing it in my own poetic way.

For example, during the time that the Reagan Administration had it's anti-cocaine public-relations campaign going on, planes were landing and delivering arms to the contras in Honduras and Nicaragua and Panama, and those planes were coming back filled to the brim with cocaine--to airports in Louisiana and Florida and Arkansas. So I could state those facts to an audience, and then just come up with a punch line, which, in this case, was--since [CIA Director] William Casey was concerned about the planes being seen on the radar screen when they came back into this country--the punch line was, while Nancy Reagan is saying, "Just Say No," the CIA is saying "Just Fly Low." The laughter would turn to applause at that line because it was a way of appreciating the fact that was being stated.

I wouldn't get any pleasure out of wearing a T-shirt about El Salvador saying "I told you so" now because, if they had listened to what people were saying then, it would have prevented countless deaths and horror. Sometimes humor is just a way of calling attention to the contradictions or the hypocrisy that's going on officially.

Q: And that's something you derived a lot of pleasure out of exposing?

Krassner: Yeah. Truth has it's own high. Since life ultimately is a mystery, you can never get to the inconceivable truth about our existence, but at least you can work on these small ones, like the Iran-contra scandal and El Salvador and all the others.

Q: How do you see yourself linking satire and history?

Krassner: I guess I'm continuing in the tradition of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Dorothy Parker, Dick Gregory, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, and Benjamin Franklin. There's this guy named Jimmy Tingle now who's doing what Mort Sahl was doing then. And it's the only thing I know how to do. I don't even have the skills to get a job as an unskilled worker.

Q: Do you think it sometimes seems that Jews have cornered the humor market?

Krassner: I think that humor transcends Judaism. I think everyone suffers. I don't think Jews have a corner on the market. What was the Passover joke I heard? Oh, Stevie Wonder went to a seder and somebody passed him a matzoh and he ran his fingers over it and asked, "Who writes this shit?"

You'll appreciate that joke if you're Jewish, African-American, blind, none of the above, or all of the above, which I guess would be Sammy Davis Jr.--but he was only half blind, right? So maybe that Muslim leader, then....

Q: What's his...