“What do you do for a living, Mr. Krassner?”
“I’m a writer and a comedian.”
“How do you spell comedian?”
Rationally I knew that you don’t have to be a good speller to be a fine surgeon, but his question made me uneasy. At least his hands weren’t shaking while he wrote. Then he told me about how simple the operation was and he mentioned almost in passing that there was always the possibility I could end up staying in the hospital for the rest of my life. Huh? There was a time when physicians practiced positive thinking to help their patients, but now it was a requirement of malpractice prevention to provide the worst-case scenario in advance.
The next morning, under the influence of Valium and Demerol, I could see that my neurosurgeon had just come from the circus, because he was wearing a clown costume, with a big round red nose over his surgical mask. He couldn’t get close to the operating table because his pointed shoes were so large, and when he had to cleanse my wound he asked the nurse to please pass the seltzer bottle . . .
“Wake up, Paul,” the anesthesiologist, said, “Surgery’s over. Wiggle your toes.”
Nancy was waiting in the hall—there she stood, “my favorite biological quirk,” as she had once described the meaning of her existence—and I was never so glad to see her smile.
That evening, at a benefit in Berkeley, Ken Kesey told the audience, “I spoke with Krassner today, and the operation was successful, but he says he’s not taking any painkillers because he never does any legal drugs.”
Then Kesey led the crowd in a chant: “Get well, Paul! Get well, Paul!”
And it worked. The following month I was performing again, wearing a neck brace at a theater in Seattle.
Bruce Springsteen and Vanna White were scheduled to costar in an epic Western musical to be filmed in Arizona, according to a front-page article in The New Times, which also carried an ad for hiring extras. More than a thousand calls came to the phone number listed, which turned out to be the governor’s office. It was April Fool’s Day, 1987.
A worldwide humor movement had been developing, and I was attending the sixth International Humor Conference, at Arizona State University, where the causes and effects of laughter were being taken very seriously by 1,500 theoreticians from thirty-five countries. I was the only performer among all these pedagogues, who delighted in analyzing that which I did instinctively.
I had dinner with the Russian delegation at the Holiday Inn. They were all having barbecued pork ribs, so the waitress placed gigantic bibs around their necks. The bib on the editor of Krokodil, the satirical tabloid published by the Soviet government, read “Superman.” The bib on their art director read “Miss America.”
We were discussing censorship. They insisted they had none, although it came out in conversation that a particular cartoon idea—showing British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher spread-eagled on a bed, with an American saying, “Where do you want these missiles?”—was not published because it was “too coarse.” I said that I could publish anything I want in The Realist, but that I also wrote for National Lampoon, and they had turned down my account of snorting cocaine with the pope; the Lampoon editors loved it but were afraid of an organized letter-writing campaign to their advertisers.
“Would Krokodil be interested in publishing that piece?” I asked.
Superman and Miss America graciously declined my offer.
On the final day of the conference, the Russians took the stage. The subject was “Soviet and American Humor.” With charming sarcasm, the Krokodil editor admitted that American humor was greater, holding up an envelope labeled “rattlesnake eggs.” He and his colleagues were “quite frightened” by this novelty-store item, which had been presented by one of their hosts.
He expressed the hope that “explosions of bombs would be replaced with explosions of laughter, and stereotypes based on hatred would be converted to handshakes of friendship.” When the session was almost over, a man in the audience called out to the Russian panelists, “Who among you is the KGB agent? Please identify the FBI agent traveling with you!” Suddenly feelings of discomfort and embarrassment filled the auditorium. I stood up and acknowledged that I was the FBI agent. The tension was broken by a burst of appreciative laughter, but I had blown my cover.
Then we took the show on the road. There was a special event at UCLA—“Soviet Humorists Meet American Humorists.” As a panel member, I was asked to try and make the Russians laugh. I chose what I felt would be an appropriate demonstration of freedom of humor, pausing after each sentence so that the interpreter could translate:
“For a political satirist,” I said, “there are ripe times. Of course, the arms-for-hostages scandal is different from the Watergate scandal. There we had the Nixon tapes, with eighteen and a half minutes missing. Now all we have is former CIA Director William Casey getting a brain operation. But what makes this suspicious is that they only removed the section from August 1985 to November 1986.”
First the Americans in the audience laughed, and then the Russians on the stage laughed.
There was a slide show scheduled, and a spotlight was now on the wall, but no slides yet. I made a shadow face with my hand, and it spoke silently on the lit-up wall. Then the art director of Krokodil made a shadow face with his hand, and we engaged in a silent conversation. The audience applauded this positive omen, heralding the end of the Cold War.
(A couple of years later, after the Berlin wall had crumbled, Ron Kovic, the author of Born on the Fourth of July, was the guest of honor at a benefit for the Alliance for Survival, and I presented him with an original fuck communism! poster. “You didn’t have to fuck Communism,” I told him, “because Communism fucked itself.”)
I covered that Humor Conference for the Los Angeles Times, titling my report “I Was a Comedian for the FBI.” Actually, I had once recognized two FBI agents taking notes at my comedy performance, so I started talking about them, and they continued to take notes. The promotional headline on the cover of the Times Sunday Calendar section blared out: Paul Krassner—“I Was a Communist for the FBI!”
According to Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle, “Fearing Krassner would sue, the Times recalled and destroyed some 300,000 copies at a cost of about $100,000. Krassner would have laughed, not sued.” Or maybe I would’ve settled out of court for $50,000 and really laughed.
But what the Times had in common with the neurosurgeon who operated on me was that neither knew how to spell comedian.
I also covered the first annual Comedy Convention in Las Vegas. As comedy had become an industry, the product had become standardized. For three days, an assembly line of sixty-four stand-up comics did fifteen-minutes showcase performances.
There were so many references to ancient and current TV shows—from Marcus Welby to Max Headroom, from Gilligan’s Island to Love Connection, from The Brady Bunch to Cagney and Lacey, from Perry Mason to Hulk Hogan, from Soupy Sales to Oprah Winfrey—it became yet another separate reality that Carlos Castaneda never dreamed of. (Castaneda was, of course, the neighborhood barber in Leave It to Beaver.)
During the Iran/Contra hearings, Peter Bergman (formerly of the Firesign Theater) and I teamed up to do a weekly commentary of KPFK. Since Oliver North and his fellow conspirators used code names—North was Steel Hammer—Peter became Commandante Baldie and I became Thunder Heart. Listeners had to identify themselves by their code names when they called—for example, Slush Fund.
Meanwhile, Scott Kelman, who had produced both Peter’s show and mine, thought that “Peter, Paul, and Harry” would be a great title for an evening of political satire at the Museum of Contemporary Art. He asked curator Julie Lazar if she knew of an appropriate performer who happened to be named Harry. She suggested Harry Shearer. Scott called me to ask about Shearer. “He’s brilliant,” I said, “let’s do it.” And so they coproduced a completely sold-out series. If Shearer had been named after his other grandfather, “Peter, Paul, and Harry” might never have happ
ened.
Each of us prepared to perform in our own particular way. Peter would stare at himself in the mirror and make strange sounds to exercise his vocal chords. Harry would sit in a separate room where his make-up woman had flown in from Iowa to transform him into Derek Smalls from Spinal Tap. And I would be off hiding behind some boxes, toking away on a joint of the marijuana that served as my creative fuel.
Scott was sure that I performed better when I wasn’t high, and he was under the impression I was straight when he told me one night, “That was the best show you’ve ever done.” I confessed that I had smoked a giant doobie before I went onstage. The irony was that Scott sold pot to help pay the rent, and that was exactly the stash that got me stoned.
A producer from The Late Show came on closing night and later invited me to be a guest. Joan Rivers had been fired and now the Fox network was continuing the show with a different host each week, Arsenio Hall becoming the most popular. At MOCA, I had related the story about taking LSD at the Chicago conspiracy trial, and the producer wanted me to tell it on The Late Show.
“I don’t want to be frozen in the sixties,” I said. “I’d rather talk about contemporary issues.”
“Such as?”
“The Iran/Contra hearings.”
“Don’t you think that’s outdated?”
“It’s only been two weeks. You want me to talk about something that happened two decades ago.”
And so I was given six minutes, live on network TV, to observe that Gary Hart wouldn’t have made a good president because he obviously didn’t know how to conduct a covert operation or how to practice plausible deniability; to explain that the Harmonic Convergence was just a bunch of virgins getting together to play their harmonicas; and to describe the Iran/Contra hearings as a convention of wimps.
Imitating a senator, I said, “We don’t mind if you wanna have a secret government, we just wanna be told about it—how else are we gonna pretend that we’re the real government?”
A couple of weeks later, the new producer, Barry Sand, a refugee from the Letterman show, called. He had seen me on The Late Show and wanted to hire me as a writer on the program that would replace it, The Wilton North Report, hosted by a pair of drive-time radio disk jockeys who referred to a woman’s breasts as “mcguffies.” Eventually Sand asked me to do an on-camera commentary for one of the run-throughs.
I didn’t own a suit, and I refused to wear one from the Fox wardrobe room, so instead they dressed me in a sweater, shirt, slacks, socks, and shoes. Only the underwear was mine. I was ready now for my commentary:I’m here to say that marijuana rots your brain. I speak from personal experience. Recently I was experimenting with pot, and suddenly I had this weird hallucination. I saw Mr. Potato Head surrendering his pipe to Surgeon General Koop. It all seemed so real. So I think it’s a good thing we found out about Supreme Court nominee Judge Ginsberg smoking those joints. It explains how he could block the Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to eliminate cancer-causing asbestos.
His mind had been totally destroyed by marijuana. Why else would he derail the EPA’s regulation on toxic chemical leaks from underground storage tanks? And it must have been burned-out brain cells that caused him to squelch a Public Health Service study of the impact of federal budget cuts on infant mortality. I’m telling you, marijuana caused a combination of plaque and smegma to grow between the lobes of his brain . . .
“I don’t think we can get away with the pot stuff,” Barry Sand said. “There’s a law against that at NBC.”
“Barry, we’re not at NBC. I’m confused. You said you wanted me to do a hard-hitting, funny commentary.”
“Don’t be confused. You’re right. If we can’t do it on Fox, where can we do it?”
Later on, he asked me to do another commentary. This one would be on the air, and if that worked out, I could do one every night. My ship had finally come in, only it happened to be the Titanic. Fox executives met with the affiliate board, which recommended that The Wilton North Report be canceled. The show would be broadcast for one more week, and I would have my fifteen minutes of fame on the installment plan.
It was a modern American dream come true. Click! There’s Johnny Carson: “Tammy Faye Bakker took her makeup off, and people thought it was Ernest Borgnine.” Click! There’s Ted Koppel interviewing Henry Kissinger. Click! There’s me, talking about how the U.S. Information Agency had adopted a policy that would allow the government to label documentary films as propaganda when certifying them for distribution in other countries. Now I was applying that same policy to news inside the United States. I had the word propaganda flashing on and off the screen, superimposed on film clips of President Reagan signing a farm bill, and New York’s Mayor Koch defending his homeless policy.
On the hundredth anniversary of the National Geographic, I recalled in my commentary how, as an adolescent, I used to look at that magazine for photos of topless native women: “It was permissible to show nakedness because these were women of color. Of course, this was before Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler, but even these men’s magazines have an unspoken agreement never to show nipples on the cover, no matter how gynecological they get on the inside pages.”
The word nipple rubbed Barry the wrong way. I had to come up with a euphemism. Protuberance? No, too clinical. Centerpiece? No, sounds like a floral arrangement. Then I found one—“How about complete breasts?”—and Barry approved. So I said “never to show complete breasts on the cover.” It was either that or “mcguffies.”
At a farewell party for the staff in the Fox garage, the cleaning lady got an ovation. She was the one, after all, who took care of the mess every evening after we had finished constructing our electronic sandcastles.
Once again I returned to stand-up comedy. I continued to learn about the craft with every performance. My reviews had progressed over the years from a Chicago Tribune critic who wrote, “Paul Krassner’s career as a comic may be as dead as a doornail,” to a Los Angeles Reader critic who wrote, “Krassner delivers ninety minutes of the funniest, most intelligent social and political commentary in town.” But, after I had performed at the Village Gate, I would read in an article about Barry Sand in Spy magazine:She [Gale Silverman, Barry’s girlfriend] was known to leave rude and/or threatening messages on the answering machines of former “Wilton North” staff members. One afternoon, while paging through The Village Voice, she spotted an ad for a nightclub comedy act by Paul Krassner, who had been a writer and performer on “Wilton North.” Silverman felt Krassner had betrayed her and Sand by writing a frank article about “Wilton North” for the Los Angeles Times, and so, understandably, she picked up the phone and prepared to call in a bomb threat to the club.
“If Paul Krassner plays there,” she said while dialing, “the place is going to blow up.” When a horrified colleague grabbed the phone away from her just in time, she shrieked, “Fuck him! I’m going to get that cocksucker back! What he did to us was horrible!”
In July 1988, I was booked to perform at Lincoln Center. Also on the program would be poet Allen Ginsberg, New Age musician Phillip Glass, and performance artist Karen Finley, whose infamous reputation for shoving a sweet potato up her ass preceded her appearance.
Nancy and I had gotten married in City Hall on April Fool’s Day, and this trip was our belated honeymoon. I forgot what traffic was like for a pedestrian—I had already received two citations for jaywalking in Venice—but now I remembered that in New York it was a crime not to jaywalk. Dodging between cars on Seventh Avenue, we made it safely across the street to the Carnegie Deli.
Henny Youngman was standing near the door. Nancy’s sister, Linda, asked permission to take a photo of him. Then she criticized him for his appearance on the Larry King show, where he had argued with attorney Gloria Allred about the admission of women to the Friars Club. Now Youngman was pleading his case to Linda.
“Don’t you think I have a right to privacy?”
“Yes, and when you feel that way, you s
hould stay home.”
That afternoon there was a sound check at Lincoln Center. I stood onstage with the microphone in my hand, doing Henny Youngman.
“Take my sexism—please.”
Before the show that evening, I was chatting with Allen Ginsberg backstage. We had been fellow protesters over the years. The poem he would read had previously been done at a benefit for Vietnam veterans. As Country Joe McDonald said, “We were against the war, not the warriors.” Ginsberg had come out of the closet long before gay rights became a public issue. With equal fervor he had been a spokesperson for hallucinogenic drugs and an uncompromising peace activist.
Instead of my usual rambling hour and a half, this night I would have only twenty-five minutes. It had to be really tight. The performance was sold out, and the critics would be there. I was extremely nervous. I was supposed to go on right after intermission. I sat in the bathroom of my dressing room and smoked a joint. Less than fifteen minutes to go. The tension had a certain stoned quality about it now. Finally the stage manager knocked on my door. It was time to confront myself. This is real. This is me. This is not a dream.
I had made a bizarre choice. Since I was both an atheist and an absurdist, I decided that the most absurd thing I could do would be to develop an intimate relationship with the deity I didn’t believe in.
“Please, God,” I prayed, “help me do a good show.”
And I heard the thundering voice of God answer, “Shut up, you superstitious fool!”
Now another offstage voice was introducing me to the audience, and I walked out there, picking up the same microphone I held that afternoon. I had been psyching myself up for an entire week in preparation for the immediacy of this instant. Lenny Bruce had taught me by example about the magic of an opening line that intuitively articulates the consciousness of the audience.
Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut Page 45
