Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/22/paul-krassner-rip-1932-2.html
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He briefly edited Hustler during Larry Flynt’s born again phase. Those issues must have been quite unique. Supposedly they contained Krassner’s satire alongside Flynt’s born again rants, and the usual porn. (Supposedly Flynt planned to make the pictorials more moral by only featuring married couples. I imagine they looked pretty much the same.)
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*** He took LSD with Groucho Marx and wrote about it.**
If this interests you, dig it up for a wonderful read. Paul, we miss you already.
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I hadn’t thought about it, but I’ve known about him since I was at least 16 in the mid-seventies. I can’t remembwt how I first heard about him, maybe that book that collected articles from the East Village Other.
I saw him speak twice in Montreal abiut 20 years ago, once at the Comedy Festival, then some April Fool’s event. I know I spoke to him briefly.
A few yeats ago I found a copy of WIN Magazine at a used book sale. That was the counterculture zine from the War Resusters League. But fusing with the counterculture. This was from early 1968, and carried a story about rhe Yippies starting up.
I must check, maybe Krassner wrote it.
He was never excessive, which made gave him longevity. He kept at it rather than burn out or move on.
This is sadder news than I would have expected. He lived a decently long life.
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" Here’s Kurt Vonnegut addressing the poster in his forward to Krassner’s 1996 collection entitled The Winner of the Slow Bicycle Race: The Satirical Writings of Paul Krassner :
Paul Krassner … in 1963 created a miracle of compressed intelligence nearly as admirable for potent simplicity, in my opinion, as Einstein’s e=mc2. With the Vietnam War going on, and with its critics discounted and scorned by the government and the mass media, Krassner put on sale a red, white and blue poster that said FUCK COMMUNISM.
At the beginning of the 1960s, FUCK was believed to be so full of bad magic as to be unprintable. COMMUNISM was to millions the name of the most loathsome evil imaginable. To call an American a communist was like calling somebody a Jew in Nazi Germany. By having FUCK and COMMUNISM fight it out in a single sentence, Krassner wasn’t merely being funny as heck. He was demonstrating how preposterous it was for so many people to be responding to both words with such cockamamie Pavlovian fear and alarm."
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Thank you for sharing Paul Krassner’s cultural impact. Looking forward to learning more about him.
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If it were me, I’d have that engraved on my headstone.
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NPR had a nice sendoff for him, too. Apparently he played Carnegie Hall as a 6-year-old violin prodigy. Godspeed, you brilliant weirdo…
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Ah so sad the great ones are leaving us. Sounds like his life was quite an inspiration to us like-minded folk.
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I KNEW there was a reason why that name rang a bell.
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RIP Paul.
Too bad there’s already a pig in the 2020 race for President, or I’d enter one. They are supposed to be smart, but this one isn’t, unless you count narcissism as intelligence:
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Vonnegut is sorely missed, too.
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I’m sorry that Krassner wasn’t around to witness this:
Personally, I’d have it done anyway. Confusion carried into the future. And cemetery buffs love a good mystery.
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If I were to get a tombstone, I would want it to have an arrow point to an adjoining plot and the words, “I’m with stupid” inscribe on it.
@zuludaddy “Excuse me, sir, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?”
“Be a 6-year-old child prodigy, son.”
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I found the Realist back in the 60’s in a off campus book store by the University of Minnesota. Later I bought the entire Realist collection and got a “life time” subscription. Years later when Paul re-started the Realist, I contacted him and reminded him I had a “life time” subscription and he kindly sent me more issues. Back in college I told my dad about Lyndon Johnson and his having sex with Kennedy’s body, not knowing it was a parody. Oops! Last year I still had my stack of Realists and wanted to give them to some one or organization for preservation but no one was interested. And as the entire collection is now preserved “on line” I guess there was no need to save the paper issues, so I threw them away. I never met Paul, but he will be missed.
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You’re in good company. Dick Gregory fell for the LBJ story too.
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It might not have been TRUE, but it certainly felt “true”.
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