Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut

by Paul Krassner

  Although NBC would never censor Johnny Carson’s references to sidekick Ed McMahon’s alcoholic adventures, the head of broadcast standards admitted to me that “if you were going to make jokes about Ed McMahon getting stoned on an illegal substance, it would not be approved.” In a society where arbitrary distinctions were drawn between legal and illegal drugs, children were being taught that it was wrong to put cyanide in Extra-Strength Tylenol but acceptable to spray paraquat on marijuana crops.

  Cable TV now allows more freedom of expression than the networks, but not so in the summer of 1980, when Emmy-Award-winning producer Ann Elder hired me as head writer for a TV special, satirizing the presidential election campaign. This was the first time HBO would feature an independent production. The show, titled A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House, would take place in a modern newsroom, with Steve Allen as anchor. There would be a bank of TV monitors serving as segues to various correspondents and the sketches they introduced. I was told that HBO wanted hard-hitting satire, but what they would finally broadcast was refried cotton candy.

  This was the first time in American history that three major presidential candidates—Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and John Anderson—had all publicly declared themselves as born-again Christians. So the election was no longer a choice between the lesser of two evils; it had become a matter of choosing between the least of three sinners. But Ann Elder told me that my concept of a “More Born-Again Than Thou” competition was “not appropriate” for HBO.

  Another idea that never saw the light of TV was concerned with the issue of unemployment. The premise was for incumbent Jimmy Carter to dream that he lost the election and had to stand on the unemployment line. He would have to deal with a clerk who’d observe that “life isn’t fair”—Carter’s own words when the Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment, which forbade the use of federal funds to pay the cost of an abortion for a woman who could not afford one herself.

  Although abortion involved a personal decision to be made by each individual, here again it became a major political issue in the presidential campaign. All the candidates had to take public positions. Our original presentation to HBO included my idea for a sketch, “The Big Sister Abortion Clinic,” wherein a poor teenage girl who is pregnant and unmarried arranges for a fetal transplant to a wealthy woman who can afford an abortion. There was no objection from HBO, but Steve Allen sent this memo:You could run into problems with the abortion sketch. More than any other important issue of our time, this one has become a deadly grim business. I wrote the book that comedy is about tragedy, etc., but because of the fact that killing—justified or not—is involved here, the issue is far more touchy than any other. If you decide to do such a sketch anyway, I would not want to be involved with it.

  And so the sketch was aborted. I respected Steve for sticking to his principles, but it was still frustrating. Every idea I came up with got knocked out somewhere along the chain of command. Ronald Reagan made a campaign promise that he would take a senility test if the proper authorities concluded that he had become senile—and indeed, as if to prove his senility, he promised that, if elected, he would end the inheritance tax for rich and poor alike—but my sketch about the “Senility Liberation Front” was eliminated from the show.

  Only one sketch from the original presentation remained in the final script. It took place in a bar where Secret Service agents hung out. But ultimately, after the sketch was thoroughly filtered and homogenized and diluted, it retained only one line of dialogue from the original script—a Secret Service agent ordering his drink through a walkie-talkie: “Bartender, I’ll have a Lee Harvey Wallbanger.” And even that was a setup which became a punchline when the real punchline was eliminated—the bartender answering through his walkie-talkie: “Yes, sir, will that be one shot or two?”

  During the two months that the show was in production, I shared a room at the Magic Motel with one of the writers, Rex Weiner, an old friend from New York. Every morning we would take a bus from Hollywood to Century City. The Hustler offices had been in one of the twin towers; the HBO offices were in the other. There were signs on the bus: warning—there are undercover cops riding this bus.

  The bus was pretty crowded, but I wanted one of those signs. I thought it would be a real coup to have one because obviously it would have been lifted from a bus, and there wasn’t an undercover cop on that bus or he would’ve busted me for taking the sign that warned about him. So I stood up on my seat and started taking down the sign. The other passengers were watching me, but nobody said anything. Except Rex.

  “Stop, thief,” he yelled. “He’s taking that sign!”

  I was blushing, but I took the sign and explained, “I’m just checking to see if there are any undercover cops on this bus.”

  Rex and I went to a wake for Doug Kenney, the producer of Animal House. It was held in a Japanese restaurant right above the Magic Motel, and there were trays of goodies to eat. We were severely tempted to start a food fight—“Doug would have wanted it that way”—but out of respect for other mourners, we resisted the temptation.

  When HBO premiered A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the White House on election eve, it was filled entirely with froth and fluff. I felt grateful that the closing credits rolled by swiftly. But the experience had been so stultifying that I decided to return to stand-up comedy, where there would be just me and a microphone and the audience, and no filters in between. In 1971 Groucho Marx had written to my publisher—“I predict that in time Paul Krassner will wind up as the only live Lenny Bruce”—and now I was ready to run with that satirical torch.

  I was scheduled to perform at Budd Friedman’s Improvisation in Hollywood in April 1981. Friedman asked me to try and get some advance publicity.

  Near the end of March, I delivered a keynote address at the Youth International Party convention in New York. These were the latterday Yippies, originally launched as the anti-Yippie “Zippies” during the 1972 Republican convention in Miami. I asked the audience a rhetorical question, “How would you like to be a Secret Service agent guarding Ronald Reagan, knowing that his vice president, George Bush, is the former head of the CIA?” Once again, satire would be outdistanced by reality. On March 30, the president was shot by John Hinckley in order to make a favorable impression on actress Jodie Foster so he could take her bowling. Moreover, Hinckley came out for gun control, and Reagan came out against it.

  On April 2, 1981, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner quoted a dispatch from the New Solidarity International Press Service:A group of terrorists and drug traffickers linked to Playboy magazine met in New York City’s Greenwich Village area and publicly discussed an assassination of President Ronald Reagan and Vice-President George Bush. The meeting convened by the Yippie organization, featured former Playboy editor [sic] Paul Krassner and numerous individuals associated with High Times magazine, Hustler magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times.

  In a statement this afternoon, national Democratic Policy Committee advisory board chairman Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., urged that this information be made public at this time as a means of assisting government investigators pursuing the assassination attempt against President Reagan. Playboy magazine, as an international dossier released in the March 30, 1981, issue of New Solidarity indicates, is at the center of an international apparatus that has in the past been directly implicated in high-level political assassinations.

  The Herald-Examiner published Playboy’s response: “Absolute, unequivocal nonsense.” And Budd Friedman said to me, “Paul that’s not exactly what I meant by advance publicity.”

  In July, New Solidarity escalated the attack and published a whole dossier on me:In the early 1950s, Paul Krassner was recruited to the stable of pornographers and ‘social satirists’ created and directed by the British Intelligence’s chief brainwashing facility, the Tavistock Institute, to deride and destroy laws and institutions of morality and human decency. Among Krassner’s circle of Tavistock iconoclasts, peddling smut
in the name of humor and ‘creative expression,’ were Lenny Bruce . . .

  These people were taken seriously in certain quarters. Lyndon LaRouche received enough campaign contributions to qualify him for matching funds from the government. And the U.S. Labor Party’s newsletter, Investigating Leads, was subscribed to by police departments across the country.

  Indeed, when two thousand demonstrators protested the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, Larouche’s private intelligence network briefed a state police lieutenant that the demonstration would be “nothing but a cover for terrorist activity”—the exact same phrase the governor would use to the media a few days before the rally.

  But . . . Tavistock . . . Tavistock . . . I just couldn’t seem to remember anything about ever having been brainwashed at the Tavistock Institute.

  They must’ve programmed it out of my consciousness.

  As a performer, I was a bundle of paradoxes. I was a hermit, yet I would go out to do shows and talk to a hundred people at once. I was a social critic, yet my spiritual path was trying not to judge others. Irreverence was my only sacred cow, yet I wouldn’t allow victims to become the target of my humor. So, there was one particular routine that I stopped using in 1970. It called for a “rape-in” of legislators’ wives in order to impregnate them so that they would then convince their husbands to decriminalize abortion.

  But feminist friends objected. I resisted at first, because it was such a well-intentioned joke. But I reconsidered. Even in a joke, why should women be assaulted because men make the laws? Legislators’ wives were the victims in that joke, but the legislators themselves, and their laws, should have been the target. For me to stop doing that bit of comedy wasn’t censorship; it was conscious evolution. And the subject of sexism became a running theme of my work as I began to tour in the fall of 1981.

  At the Village Gate in New York: “There’s definite sexism in the movie E.T—I mean, how do we know E.T. is male? Because the little boy says, ‘I’m keeping him.’ This is a blatant male chauvinist assumption. I’ve seen E.T. and there’s no penis. And even if there were, it would be human chauvinism to assume it was a penis. How do we know it’s not just a spare battery holder for E.T.’s finger with the red light?”

  At Cross Currents in Chicago: “We’ve all heard the expression, ‘Don’t bogart that joint.’ It comes from the old macho image of Humphrey Bogart with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. I think there should be a feminist campaign of re-education, so that the next time somebody holds onto a joint rather than passing it, instead of saying, ‘Don’t bogart that joint,’ you say, ‘Don’t bacall that joint.’”

  At the Improvisation in Los Angeles: “They did a test on Canadian mice and discovered that when male mice smoked marijuana they grew female breasts. And the same phenomenon has been found with humans. Men who smoke marijuana have actually been growing female breasts. That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s cutting down on sexual harassment in the office. The men just fondle their own breasts.”

  While I was in New York, a nun was raped. When I got to Chicago, the rapist was also there. He had given himself up to the police. Onstage I explained the true reason why: “He heard that the Mafia, in a rush of Christian compassion, put a $25,000 contract out on his life. So now I’m asking the Mafia to use their clout to end the war in El Salvador since four nuns were raped and killed there.” They must’ve heard my request. By the time I got to Los Angeles, the Herald-Examiner was reporting that the Mafia was “probably the largest source of arms for the rebels in El Salvador.”

  In the spring of 1982, there was a Radical Humor Festival at New York University. On the opening night panel, I described the abortion sketch excluded from that HBO show:This was around the time that the Hyde Amendment had been upheld by the Supreme Court. Which meant that poor women could not get an abortion paid for by Medicaid. So I was gonna write this sketch about the Big Sister Abortion Clinic. There’s a teenage girl who is pregnant and unmarried, but she can’t afford an abortion, and she’s not ready to be a mother yet. So they introduce her to her Big Sister, who’s a wealthy woman who is married, has a successful career, does social work, has three kids of her own, but has never had an abortion and feels unfulfilled as an emancipated woman because the real issue is choice, and she just wants to exercise her choice.

  So they arrange for a fetal transplant. This is where the fetus is transplanted from the womb of the poor teenage girl to the womb of the wealthy woman. Now this is a perfectly safe operation, it’s legal, and best of all it’s paid for by Medicaid. So now, that wealthy woman, the Big Sister, is not going to carry this pregnancy to term—she’s not gonna be a surrogate mother—but as soon as the scar from the fetal transplant heals, then she’ll get an abortion, because she can afford it, while the teenage girl doesn’t have to bear an unwanted baby, and neither of them is violating any laws.

  A Village Voice critic wrote:In sniping at the Hyde Amendment, Krassner had taken potshots at middle-class women—they had become his victims, the real target of his piece. And we had all laughed. For me, that’s one of the scariest aspects of comedy.

  That weekend, the festival sponsored an evening of radical comedy. The next day, my performance was analyzed by an unofficial women’s caucus. Robin Tyler (“I am not a lesbian comic—I am a comic who is a lesbian”) served as the spokesperson for their conclusions. What had caused a stir was my reference to the use of turkey basters by single mothers-to-be who were attempting to impregnate themselves by artificial insemination.

  Tyler explained to me, “You have to understand, some women still have a hang-up about penetration.”

  Well, I must have been suffering from Delayed Punchline Syndrome, because it wasn’t until I was on the plane, contemplating the notion that freedom of absurdity transcends gender difference, that I finally did respond, in absentia: “Yeah, but you have to understand, some men still feel threatened by turkey basters.”

  I could hardly wait to share this concept with my next audience.

  The San Francisco Socialist School had booked me to perform at the Women’s Building on May Day evening. Three days before the show, the Women’s Building contacted the Socialist School, asking that I not be allowed to perform because it had just come to their attention that I had once been associated with Hustler magazine. The female organizers at the Socialist School refused to call off the event and switched the location to Modern Times, a feminist bookstore.

  Performing in the Bay Area always had an extra dimension for me, because the audiences there were beyond hip—and Berkeley was the absolute epicenter of political correctness. One night I was performing at Ashkanaz:You know, men wouldn’t be so worried about having a premature ejaculation if they could only have multiple orgasms. Then it wouldn’t be a premature ejaculation, it’d just be the first one. Women can have multiple orgasms—but they also have to menstruate—that’s Emerson’s Law of Compensation. If I could have multiple orgasms, I would be totally willing to have a regular menstrual cycle every month. I’d suffer through a heavy flow for a few days—get a little bitchy, maybe—but it’d be worth it. So, is there a Devil in the house? I’ll sign a pact right now.

  A young woman in the audience approached me after the show. She thought that it was inappropriate for me to talk about menstruation as a negative process. She felt it was a sacred process which kept her in touch with the cycles of Nature. I always welcomed this kind of dialogue. I even encouraged audiences to interrupt me while I was onstage. At one show, a woman called out, “I’m so tired of hearing this sexist bullshit.”

  “Which sexist bullshit?” I asked. “Could you be specific?”

  “That sexist bullshit,” she repeated. “Why don’t you say cowshit?”

  At another show, I happened to mention that “I have a pathological resistance to memorizing stuff.” A woman stood up and identified herself as a member of NAPA, the Network Against Psychiatric Assault. She objected to my use of the wor
d pathological. She said, “Friends of mine who committed no crime have been incarcerated in mental institutions against their will because some authority figure labeled them as ‘pathological.’”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “ I didn’t mean to offend you, and I know that what you say is true, but I was just making fun of myself, really, so let’s not get paranoid—I know, I know, that’s another.” The woman from NAPA laughed along with the rest of the audience, and I knew I was doing my job right.

  ABC Evening News anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent Harry Reasoner wrote in his memoir, Before the Colors Fade:

  I’ve only been aware of two figures in the news during my career with whom I would not have shaken hands if called to deal with them professionally. I suppose that what Thomas Jefferson called a decent respect for the opinion of mankind requires me to identify those two. They were Senator Joseph McCarthy and a man named Paul Krassner or something like that who published a magazine called The Realist in the 1960s.

  I guess everyone knows who McCarthy was. Krassner and his Realist were part of a ’60s fad—publications attacking the values of the establishment—which produced some very good papers and some very bad ones. Krassner not only attacked establishment values; he attacked decency in general, notably with an alleged “lost chapter” from William Manchester’s book, The Death of a President.

  I appreciated Reasoner’s unintentional irony—having started my career as a political satirist by making fun of McCarthyism—but I resented being coupled with Senator McCarthy. Whereas he had senatorial immunity for his libels, I risked lawsuits for what I published.

  What I really wanted to do, though, was crash a party where Harry Reasoner would be. “Excuse me, Mr. Reasoner, I just wanted to say how much I enjoy your work on 60 Minutes.” And then, as a photographer captured us shaking hands, I would say, “I’m really glad to meet you. My name is Paul Krassner or something like that.”