Funnier than Danny Kaye, more powerful
than Jerry Lewis, as important as
acid. That was Paul Krassner to me during the 1960s.
I'll explain.
As America entered the Magic Decade,
I was leading a double life. I had
been a rule-bender and law-breaker since first grade.
A highly developed
disregard for authority got me kicked out of three schools,
the altar boys,
the choir, summer camp, the Boy Scouts and the Air Force.
I didn¹t trust
the police or the government, and I didn't like bosses
of any kind. I had
become a pot smoker at 13 (1950), an unheard-of act in
an old-fashioned
Irish neighborhood. It managed to get me through
my teens.
But my career goals had a different
flavor. From the earliest age, I
had wanted to be a comedian--like Danny Kaye or Jerry
Lewis. It was an
understandable goal for someone who didn't quite fit
in, but it was a
decidedly mainstream dream. To get ahead, it required
playing by the rules
and pleasing the public, mostly on their own terms.
So that's what I did. My affection
for pot continued and my disregard
for standard values increased, but they lagged behind
my need to succeed.
The Playboy Club, Merv Griffin, Ed Sullivan and the Copacabana
were all part
of a path I found uncomfortable but necessary during
the early 1960s.
But as the decade churned along and
the country changed, I did too.
Despite working in "establishment" settings, as a veteran
malcontent I found
myself hanging out in coffee houses and folk clubs with
others who were
out-of-step people who fell somewhere between beatnik
and hippie. Hair got
longer, clothes got stranger, music got better.
It became more of a strain for me
to work for straight audiences. I
took acid and mescaline. My sense of being on the
outside intensified. I
changed.
All through this period I was sustained
and motivated by The Realist,
Paul Krassner's incredible magazine of satire, revolution
and just plain
disrespect. It arrived every month, and with it,
a fresh supply of
inspiration. I can't overstate how important it
was to me at the time. It
allowed me to see that others who disagreed with the
American consensus were
busy expressing those feelings and using risky humor
to do so.
Paul¹s own writing, in particular,
seemed daring and adventurous to me;
it took big chances and made important arguments in relentlessly
funny
ways. I felt, down deep, that maybe I had some
of that in me, too; that
maybe I could be using my skills to better express my
beliefs. The Realist
was the inspiration that kept pushing me to the next
level; there was no way
I could continue reading it and remain the same.
My changes took a year or two and,
as the '70s rolled into view, I found
my comic voice, just as The Realist found countless rich
targets in Nixon,
Agnew, Kissinger, and the many Republican criminals who
paraded through our
lives. Not even disco could dim Paul's light, and
in subsequent years it
has grown only brighter, as these pages and his earlier
books will attest.
Readers of Playboy, High Times, the
L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles
Times all have benefited from his informed sense of outrage,
his intelligent
dissent and his ever-lively spirit of civic mischief.
The fun and laughs
are simply bonuses. You will find them all present
in this collection of
reminiscences, reportage, illuminations, fantasies and
just plain
hallucinations.
By the way, I still have my collection
of The Realist from the '60s and
'70s. I keep them in a cheap plastic, red-white-and-blue,
American-flag
shoulder bag inscribed on the side, "1968 Democratic
National Convention."
I wasn't there--I was represented by Paul Krassner.