Before Saturday Night Live gave Americans their “Weekend Update” and John Oliver campaigned to “Make Donald Drumpf Again,” before The Onion skewered headlines with satire and activists sent a baby Trump balloon into the sky, Paul Krassner and the Yippies nominated a pig named Lyndon Pigasus Pig for president.
Krassner, who died at his home in Southern California on July 21 at age 87, was one of the best known faces of the Youth International Party, the political party he cofounded.
“I knew that we had to have a ‘who’ for the ‘who, what, where, when and why’ that would symbolize the radicalization of hippies for the media,” Krassner told the Associated Press in 2009. “So I started going through the alphabet: Bippie, Dippie, Ippie, Sippie. I was about to give up when I came to Yippie.”
“Working backwards, I saw that the words youth and international and party were so appropriate because it was a youth movement, it was international, and it was a party, in both senses of the word,” Krassner told Terry Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air, in a 1988 interview.
Described in their heyday by Time magazine as “1968's version of the hippies” and “an amorphous amalgam of the alienated young that coalesced in Manhattan...around a coterie of activist hippies, all in their late 20s and early 30s,” the Yippies gained notoriety for their radical, performative political antics.
The Yippies sent dollar bills raining onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, attempted to levitate the Pentagon at a mass demonstration in Washington, D.C., and organized anti-war protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, according to The New York Times.
In addition to his YIP activism, Krassner established himself as an unapologetically searing satirist, and a boundary-pushing writer and editor on pressing social issues.
Krassner was born on April 9, 1932, in Brooklyn. According to the AP, he studied journalism at Baruch College and started writing professionally in the 1950s, for Lyle Stuart’s anti-censorship publication, The Independent, according to The New York Times. That gig soon led to humor-writing opportunities at Mad magazine. When another, smaller progressive publication under Stuart’s management folded, Stuart gave Krassner a list of that publication’s subscribers, 600 of whom Krassner was able to sell on his own counter-culture publication of political satire, The Realist, which he established in 1958 as a version of Mad for adults, according to the Times.
“I had no role models and no competition, just an open field mined with taboos waiting to be exploded,” Krassner wrote in his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture.
Those “taboos” included one notoriously poorly received article suggesting that acting president Lyndon B. Johnson engaged in gross sexual improprieties in the immediate aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, according to The Washington Post.
Cartoonist and archivist Ethan Persoff, who described Krassner as his “creative father figure” in a tweet following the news of Krassner’s death, successfully tracked down and digitized all 146 issues of the The Realist in recent years.
“Going from issue 1 through 146 of The Realist is a very unfiltered way to immerse yourself in the mindset of challenging racism, fighting the government, and enjoying drugs for self-discovery,” Persoff told Teen Vogue in an email. “You can track the emergence of feminism and other important fights too. If you read every page you sort of grow at the same pace as the magazine. It's radicalizing, and in a comfortable way.”
In particular, Persoff is inspired by Krassner’s knack for bitingly hilarious headlines.
“Sometimes you have to just say things matter of factly,” Persoff said. “Modern example: The New York Times might say ‘Mitch McConnell Blocks Another Bill.’ Paul would just cut to the chase and give the same story a different headline, ‘Asshole of the Month.’"
Krassner’s daughter, Holly Krassner Dawson, who described her father to Teen Vogue as one of “the most generous and kindest...smartest and funniest persons” she ever knew, said her father believed reality was always nipping at the heels of satire.
“Now it’s finally caught up,” Krassner Dawson said to Teen Vogue in an email. “My dad was not a fan of [Donald] Trump, or of the current trend of extreme political correctness and shutting down of ideas, speech, and people. He combined entertainment with the First Amendment, and that combo is more necessary than ever.”
“It's ridiculous to consider saying ‘F-CK’ publicly being considered an act of obscenity, but in Paul's time it was a crime,” Persoff said. “Think of any concert you've been to where the performer has playfully shot out any string of entertaining four-letter words...These words have power for both the performer and the audience, and they first found their freedom in print. Paul was one of the big risk takers to emancipate language. Part of Paul's legacy is calling out the hypocrisy and the ridiculous nature of these First Amendment restrictions.”
Beyond advocating for free speech, Krassner was able to use the pages of The Realist as a platform to advance the fight for reproductive rights. In the June/July 1959 issue of the magazine, reporter Harry Kursh wrote one of the earliest articles ever published on the topic of oral contraceptives, according to Persoff’s archival research. The pill was not approved for use in the U.S. until 1960. Then, in the June 1962 issue, The Realist published a lengthy “Impolite Interview With an Abortionist,” which served as the catalyst for what became Krassner’s underground abortion-referral service.
“For years, Paul would answer the phone, about 5-10 times a day, and help frightened women needing some place to go,” Persoff said. “When I spoke with Paul and asked about this, he mentioned, ‘This was an opportunity to truly help people. It wasn't a placard like 'peace now,’ it was really helping people in need. So I couldn't reject their help. I had to help, so I answered the phone every time someone called, and I gave them the phone number."
“While a lot of my dad’s work had shock value, it was also about having a voice and making an impact,” Dawson Krassner said.
Persoff said he sees the Yippie spirit reflected in the American youth’s current anti-gun activism. “There are few times in history when the youth has had as much collective organizing power as it does today,” Persoff said. “Now is a great opportunity to exhibit Yippie ideas online, or in organizing protests.”
"It's strange to be 70 and still identify with a youth movement,” Krassner told The New York Times in 2003. “But I'd rather identify with evolution than stagnation."
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