Paul Krassner profile

John Rogers of AP profiled 77-year-old Paul Krassner, co-founder of the Yippies and publisher of The Realist, the newsletter that was a big influence on bOING bOING.

He was once a child music prodigy and in the decades since, Paul Krassner has been everything from political satirist to author, editor, anarchist and an advocate for both peace and pornography.

But the title he may favor is one he found buried in his FBI file.

"To classify Krassner as a social rebel is far too cute," a letter in the file said in response to a favorable magazine interview with the co-founder of the Yippie Party, the group that notoriously disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. "He's a nut, a raving, unconfined nut."

So Krassner titled his autobiography "Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut."

"I figured I might as well make use of it," says the author, smiling broadly as he sits in the living room of his modest tract home in this sandy, sagebrush-dotted corner of the Mojave Desert on a scorchingly hot morning.

Paul has a new book coming out, called Who's to Say What's Obscene: Politics, Culture and Comedy in America Today. Yippie founder Paul Krassner still testing limits

• [Pixel23]

  Odd, the cover of his new book in the post is different than what’s on amazon and City Lights, http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100005960

  Wonder if City Lights had to move the Wally Wood image to the right a bit to avoid showing Snow White’s bottom?

  Ironic if the cover of this book was changed for being obscene.

• [Marchhare]

  How is it that Arianna Huffington wrote the forward? Is there a connection I’m missing?

• [jjj]

  “How is it that Arianna Huffington wrote the forward? Is there a connection I’m missing?”
  I think she dropped acid with Karl Marx.
  He does show up on her blog sometimes, 40 year old philosophies are considered hip there…bummer that he’s part of the new Establishment, man.

• [Takuan]

  40 years?

• [Dirk]

  That Wally Wood illustration always cracks me up.

• [Roy Trumbull]

  In my DJ days Paul was going to be in SF a week and the only time we could get together so I could do an interview was one weekday night. I told him I was conflicted because I’d promised to get fitted for a Santa Claus suit for a do-good gig. He went with me. The lady who’d roped me into this was really fat. She had two younger sisters who were cute. Paul sat through this without saying a word. After we were back in the car he commented on her girth but said the sisters were nice. We drove in silence before he added, “But they’re the kind of girls if you made love to them they’d say: “Gee, that was nice!”"

• [buddy66]

  What is it with this country? Everyone interesting has an FBI file.

  Not really. Other people have them too. I’ve got one and I’m kind of tedious.

  P.K.’s newsprint mag was really cutting edge stuff in 1960. He led the charge against Philistia with satire and wit, along with maybe a dozen other people doing the heavy lifting for us. But after he dropped acid he seemed to kind of mellow out. Plus he became a father, and that always slows a guy down.

  I’ll always love his rejoinder to Joe Pine, the Cold War’s version of Rush Limbaugh, when Pine asked him if his splotchy complexion interfered with his love life: “Well, Joe, does your having only one leg affect your sex life?”

• [Anonymous]

  What is it with this country? Everyone interesting has an FBI file.

• [Anonymous]

  Krassner dropped LSD with Groucho Marx – which is pretty cool.

  An account here:
  http://www.miqel.com/entheogens/groucho-marx-on-lsd.html

• [Anonymous]

  Should his book be entitled, “Who’s to say what’s crass?”?

• [3.14chan]

  #1 seems like government think that they are interesting too…

• [MJK]

  When I was 16 I discovered the Realist on a local magazine stand. When I was 17 I got one of Krassner’s Fuck Communism posters. It was brilliant. I hung it up in my room. My God-loving mom was apoplectic and, unusually, speechless. “Gee Mom,” I said. “Do you like Communists?”

  Bless her. And bless Paul.