In Praise of Indecency

by Paul Krassner

  There was a silent auction of goods donated by local businesses and national sex celebrities. Literature was available so that guests could learn more about the charitable groups they were helping to support. Promotional material from sponsoring companies was prominently displayed. The doors to the Masturbate-a-thon opened at 6 p.m., and the party ended at 2 a.m. Guests had to sign a liability waiver “in case you slip in your own spunk.”

  The main room was masturbation-free. Beyond that was a large, open space with the Orgazmatron. “ThrillHammer excitement will be broadcast live on the Internet,” Darklady announced, “but the shy and saucy can protect their identity and still get a good internal massage by wearing one of the lovely masks generously donated by Bad Attitude. A modesty screen will also shield the especially shy from view. Please limit yourself to masturbation as this is, after all, a celebration of self-love.”

  Meanwhile, the practice of masturbation continues on and on, a 24/7 eclectic juggernaut. Following are a few examples of diversity in action.

  During the trial of fertilizer salesman Scott Peterson, prosecutor Rick Distasto presented evidence that, three weeks after Peterson’s wife Laci disappeared, he added a couple of hard-core porn channels to the programming on his satellite dish. Defense attorney Mark Geragos called this “as great a form of character assassination as I don’t know what,” although his client was on trial for the murder of his wife and their unborn child.

  Peterson had added the Playboy channel two weeks after Laci’s disappearance. Geragos argued, “There is nothing different in the Playboy channel that isn’t on HBO at night”— the couple already had HBO—but Distasto pointed out that, one week later, Peterson “canceled the Playboy channel and ordered two hardcore pornography channels.” Geragos asserted that, without being able to show that Laci didn’t want porn in their home, the fact that her husband ordered it after she disappeared is irrelevant. “It’s meant to inflame the jury,” he said.

  But at least Peterson jerked off in the privacy of his own living room. In Creek County, Oklahoma, 57-year-old Judge Donald Thompson was accused of frequently masturbating under his robes while his court was in session, using a special device for enhancing erections. At his trial, several witnesses— including jurors in his court and police officers who testified in trials—said that they heard the “swooshing” sound of a penis pump during trials and had seen the judge slumped in his chair, with his elbows on his knees, working the device.

  Lisa Foster, who was his court reporter for fifteen years, testified: “I remember once he was using the pump during a rape trial. Another time it was during a murder trial. A baby that had been beaten to death. The baby’s grandfather was teary-eyed describing the last time he had seen the baby, and the judge was up there pumping. It was sickening.” In 2006, Thompson, who had been a judge for twenty-two years, was found guilty of indecent exposure and sentenced to four years in prison.

  “But even the president of the United States,” Bob Dylan sang, “sometimes must have to stand naked.” Dylan didn’t mention anything about jerking off, but, according to Monica Lewinsky in the Starr Report, after she performed incomplete fellatio on Bill Clinton, he would masturbate into the sink or ejaculate onto her blue dress. Clinton had previously fired Surgeon General Joycelin Elders for suggesting that we give our children sex education, which would include some information about masturbation.

  Several years ago, I was at the home of a friend when someone visited him in order to borrow some pornography. It was Francis Crick, who in 1962 won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his and two others’ seminal (yes, seminal) discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. In a bestselling 1968 book, The Double Helix, James Watson wrote that Crick was so elated on the day of that discovery that he announced to the patrons of a local pub that the pair had just discovered “the secret of life.”

  Their discovery in 1953 helped launch the modern field of molecular genetics, with far-reaching implications for understanding our biology, as well as spin-offs ranging from genetic engineering to DNA fingerprinting, plus DNA imprinting found in blood, saliva and hair follicles. Certainly, to reveal that Crick liked to play with himself is not, in the words of Geragos, “as great a form of character assassination as I don’t know what.” I’ve waited until after Crick’s death to write about this, but the seemingly incongruous image of a Nobel Prize winner masturbating to porn in no way diminishes his accomplishments. There is not the slightest bit of inconsistency between his jerking off and being described by Caltech professor Christof Koch, his collaborator for many years, in these words: “He was the living incarnation of what it is to be a scholar: brilliant, rational, dispassionate and always willing to revise his own opinions and views in light of the actions of a universe that never ceased to astonish him. He was editing a manuscript on his deathbed, a scientist until the bitter end.”

  The Los Angeles Times obituary stated: “An inveterate collaborator and gatherer of thinkers about him, Crick mused over the years on questions as varied as why people dream, where life came from and whether much of the DNA in our cells was parasitic junk.” Ironically, in recent years, DNA has become a euphemistic synonym for semen. So there you have it. A fertilizer salesman, a judge, a president and a Nobel laureate. Together, they represent a monument to masturbation as the Great American Equalizer.

  THE MAN BEHIND

  THE ARISTOCRATS

  THE MAN BEHIND THE ARISTOCRATS

  When I was a kid, I bought a book titled 2500 Jokes For All Occasions. I would read each one and try to understand why it was funny. And after a while, they weren’t funny; I was just analyzing them. Later on, I would read an article in the National Enquirer, “How To Tell a Joke,” from which I learned an important piece of advice: “Always save the punch line for last.”

  Spoiler alert: There’s a classic joke that involves a theatrical family performing all kinds of kinky sex acts—incest, scatology, bestiality—and the punch line is simply the name of their act: “The Aristocrats.” The more vulgar the body of the joke, the more ironic the punch line becomes.

  What I like about that joke is how the telling of it becomes like a Buddhist parable where the journey itself supercedes the destination, so that even if you already know the punch line, it can nevertheless enhance the path that will take you there. And, of course, there are variations. I even made up a clean version: This group, a family of seven, go to a theatrical agent.

  “What do you do?” he asks.

  “We all get together in a line, play the saxophone, wear tuxedos, our shoes are always shined, we put the sax down and do Dixieland clarinet, then we have bongo drums, with one hand we play bongos and the other hand we do double-jointed things with our fingers. For a finale we sing ‘May God Continue to Bless America.’”

  “And what do you call yourselves?”

  “The Pukes.”

  Paul Provenza told me this version:

  “What do you do?”

  “I shit on liberals onstage.”

  “What do you call yourself?”

  “Ann Coulter.”

  Provenza is an edgy stand-up comic and serious actor (he portrayed Abbie Hoffman in a stage version of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial). He is the co-producer (with Penn Jillette, the bigger and unsilent half of iconoclastic magicians Penn & Teller) and director of The Aristocrats, a documentary which consists of that joke being told and commented on by a hundred comedians, all performing their own, unequivocally filthy, improvised renderings.

  It was the hottest ticket at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005. Originally, the plan was to play only in New York, but ultimately the movie opened around the country. Provenza interviewed me for it at a genuinely funky hotel called The Cadillac, which reveals the larger significance of the joke, the human desire to embellish reality for the sake of image. I in turn interviewed Provenza on opening night of The Aristocrats.

  Q. What question would you like to be asked that no journalist or reporter or interviewer has asked yo
u yet?

  A. “How big is your cock?”

  Q. Virtually all the people who have interviewed you can’t use the language of the film that they’re interviewing you about. What temptations have you had?

  A. Well, you know, the funny thing is that both Penn and I will actually say that stuff anyway. And it’s really funny, because they don’t get mad at us, because in this context we’re clearly not trying to annoy anybody. It’s just kind of the nature of Hollywood.

  Q. And you give the professional bleepers more jobs.

  A. There’s this comedian in the U. K., he did the funniest thing. He was talking about doing stand-up in America on TV. He said, “It’s weird, what’s that about? The next time I went back, I cursed in all the appropriate places, and they bleeped me out, but the joke was on them because I said ‘cunt’ in Morse Code.”

  Q. All those 95-year-old veterans are gonna appreciate that.

  A. The best interview that we had, I think, was with [film critic]

  Elvis Mitchell. And it was because not once did he mention or ask anything about obscenity. He just went right past that, and that was so refreshing. I said to him afterward, “You know, I just gotta tell you, you’re the first one who’s never talked about the obscenity in any way, shape or form. Why?” And he said, “Why would I waste time talking about that? I thought it was really great.”

  And that’s one of the things a lot of people don’t get—which is in some ways good and some ways bad. In some ways it’s good because a lot of people are funny, and this could be kind of a breath of fresh air, thumbing your nose at the PC doctrine, the FCC and all that sort of stuff, and they’re getting behind the fact that somebody’s out there not playing by the rules. And you know what, no one’s getting hurt.

  Q. And you have that warning tagline—“No Nudity. No Violence. Unspeakable Obscenity”—in the ads. So nobody can say, “I didn’t know.”

  A. Exactly. Although, there was one story we heard about a family that went with their kids to see a sneak preview in Florida somewhere, and they apparently thought they were gonna see the Aristocats. So here’s the best part. It was a half an hour before they left. They had faith in the dancing and singing cats.

  Q. Maybe they thought it would be part of the act.

  A. We don’t want that to happen. We don’t want people blindsided. We’re telling everybody, “Hey, the language can get a little rough there, come on in with us if you want.” So we figure, let’s be right up front about it, and some people are under the impression that that’s a sort of marketing thing, that we’re saying, “Hey, it’s filthy, come here and see our filthy movie.” That’s not really our motivation. That tagline was actually Penn’s idea.

  He said, “I would really like this said on everything, because it says everything you need to know, and it’s not that bludgeon over the head of ‘Hey, come see our dirty movie.’” To me and Penn, there’s so much more going on than the dirty joke. In fact, we didn’t even choose this joke because it was dirty—that was secondary—we chose it because of the structure and the history of it and the fact that if you’re gonna say to somebody, “We’ll do this joke,” imagine that, so many people know it right away, but the fact that it’s dirty really had nothing to do with it.

  Q. And there aren’t that many jokes that allow that level of improvisation.

  A. The fact that it was a dirty joke would raise other issues, and it would be interesting and would create an interesting dynamic between the movie and the audience, and also in the audience amongst themselves. But the other thing that was really cool about being a filthy joke was that people really had to let their guards down, that you can’t go to these places and still be concerned about your image. And so in an effort to really get behind the scenes and really get free and loose, this joke kind of makes it impossible not to be.

  Q. You could always supply masks at the box office.

  A. Or those headsets that bleep it out for you. You know that new company called Clean-Film? I can’t wait for them to get their hands on this one. They’d be selling like little tiny pieces of tape, “Here you go.”

  Q. Just the title and that’s it. I’m waiting for the Pope’s review: “Even worse than Harry Potter.”

  A. We’ve already made it onto a few Christian Enemies websites.

  Q. That’s great, because it just calls attention to rebel Christians who’d want to see it. It can’t hurt, it can only help.

  A. That’s right. A lot of people sitting there taking notes. Reporters always ask me how it’s gonna play in the red states. Well, first of all, everybody tells dirty jokes—there’s nothing political about that, really—I mean, doctors, lawyers, artists, professors, astrophysicists, truck drivers, NASCAR drivers, firemen, everybody tells dirty jokes, so there really is no division, but the thing that’s really frustrating is that I don’t believe that there’s red states and blue states.

  What we have is fifty purple states. It’s only a couple of thousand people in every state that makes it red or blue, and in a country of 300-million, each of those is statistically insignificant. So what we really have is fifty purple states. There’s no culture war. There’s just as many people in Tennessee that are on one side of this equation as there are on the other side of the equation. And this notion that these are red states basically keeps putting forward the propaganda that there’s some sort of mandate. This is a crock of shit.

  It’s the same issue I have with the Christian Fundamentalists. It’s the press, really, that’s responsible for artists, distributors, networks, film studios, vendors, producers censoring themselves, because they are all under the impression that “Oh, you can’t put this out there.” “Oh, you can’t do that.” You know what? It’s a crock of shit, because Eminem’s still selling megaplatinum, porn is still a jillion-dollar industry, and this nonsense is just being propagated as a reality, and it’s not at all.

  The proof in that is very simple, which is that when you check into a hotel room, it’s still $9.95 to see a titty movie, but they give you the Bible for free, because that’s what people think of, they’ll pay for the titties and they don’t wanna pay for the Bible.

  Q. That sums it up.

  A. In America it works on supply and demand, that’s all you need to know. The profit share. The whole Janet Jackson tit thing, we already know that two hundred people wrote thousands of letters. Meanwhile, the rest of the country was Tivoing back and forth like crazy. You know, put titties on TV and then see how many complain as opposed to how many get upset when you try to take those things away again.

  Q. I once asked Ann Coulter what labels she would substitute for conservative and liberal. She answered, “Americans and cowards.”

  A. By the way, I wrestled her to the ground in the Green Room of Politically Incorrect.

  Q. You mean literally?

  A. Literally. We had a wrestling match on the ground.

  Q. Who proposed it?

  A. It just kinda happened. I looked at her, and I said, “You said the stupidest thing I have ever heard in my life,” and then she asked me for a cigarette and I gave it to her, and then she said something else stupid, and I took the cigarette back and I said, “I’m not giving you anything any more, you’re too stupid,” and then we went for it. Hilarious. She had actually said on camera that China, all of these Asian cultures, never gave the world anything of any value until it got Christianity. And I said that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard any human being say.

  Q. And then what’d she say?

  A. “It’s true.” She fell to her knees, her skirt was up to her ass. That’s why Bush and his fundamentalist cronies are really so dangerous, because they’re really not trying to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes. They really, genuinely believe this shit, and that’s what’s really scary. That’s worse. Penn believes that she’s crafting a character. He believes that she doesn’t believe any of it.

  Q. How many hours did you shoot for The Aristocrats?

  A. We sho
t 140 hours, and had to edit it down to ninety minutes.

  Q. Who would you like to have included that you didn’t?

  A. Buddy Hackett. Rodney Dangerfield. Johnny Carson.

  Q. Okay, last question: How big is your cock?

  A. Stand back!

  SHOWING PINK

  SHOWING PINK

  As Penthouse magazine was on its way to bankruptcy, publisher Bob Guccione said, “The future has definitely migrated to electronic media.” And Hustler publisher Larry Flynt—who eagerly joined that migration—has complained, “If you ever cruise the Net and see everything that’s available, it’s glutted with sleaze. It’s a nightmare out there. This has to be affecting the revenues of people like myself.”

  But both have played pivotal roles in the evolution of popular pornography. Men’s magazines had started out showing breasts but not nipples, buttocks but not anuses—and never, never a vagina. Nor did pubic hair used to be all over the place, only to eventually get bikini-waxed out of existence except for certain niche sites. Even nudist magazines had once air-brushed men and women into department-store mannequins without genitalia playing volleyball.

  The great pubic breakthrough occurred in Penthouse in 1971. A triangular patch of dark curly hair eventually opened Pandora’s Box wider and wider until Hustler began “showing pink” in 1974. Even Flynt’s own wife Althea showed pink. One issue featured a Scratch-’n’-Sniff centerspread. When you scratched the spread-eagled model in her designated area, a scent of lilac bath oil emanated from her vulva.