I told him about the sketch I had written for Steve Allen, “Unsung Heroes of Television,” with the man whose job it was on You Bet Your Life to wait for the secret word to be said so that he could drop the duck down, and Groucho told me about one of his favorite contestants on the show. “He was an elderly gentleman with white hair, but quite a chipper fellow. I asked him what he did to retain his sunny disposition. 'Well, I'll tell you, Groucho,’ he says, 'every morning I get up and I make a choice to be happy that day.'”
Groucho was holding onto his cigar for a long time, but he never smoked it, he only sniffed it occasionally. “Everybody has their own Laurel and Hardy,” he mused. “A miniature Laurel and Hardy, one on each shoulder. Your little Oliver Hardy bawls you out--he says, ‘Well, this is a fine mess you've gotten us into.’ And your little Stan Laurel gets all weepy–--Oh, Ollie, I couldn't help it. I'm sorry, I did the best I could.’”
Later, when Groucho started chuckling to himself, I hesitated to interrupt his reverie, but I had to ask, “What struck you funny?”
“I was thinking about this movie, Skidoo,” he said. “I mean some of it is just plain ridiculous. This hippie inmate puts a letter he got, which is soaked in LSD, into the water supply of the prison, and suddenly everybody gets completely reformed. There's a prisoner who says, ‘Oh, gosh, now I don't have to be a rapist any more!’ But it's also sophisticated in its own way. I like how Jackie Gleason, the character he plays, accepts the fact that he's not the biological father of his daughter.”
“Oh, really? That sounds like the ultimate ego loss.”
“But I'm really getting a big kick out of playing somebody named God like a dirty old man. You wanna know why?”
“Typecasting?”
“No, no--it's because--do you realize that irreverence and reverence are the same thing?”
“Always?”
“If they're not, then it's a misuse of your power to make people laugh.” His eyes began to tear. “That's funny. I'm not even sad.” Then he went to urinate, and when he came back, he said, “You know, everybody is waiting for miracles to happen. But the whole human body is a goddamn miracle.” He recalled Otto Preminger telling him about his own response to taking LSD and then he mimicked Preminger's accent: “I saw tings, bot I did not zee myself.” Groucho was looking in a mirror on the dining room wall, and he said, “Well, I can see myself, but I still don't understand what the hell I'm doing here . . .”
A week later, Groucho told me that members of the Hog Farm commune who were extras in the movie had turned him on with marijuana on the set of Skidoo. “You know,” I said, “my mother once warned me that LSD would lead to pot.” “Well,” he said, ”your mother was right.”
When Skidoo was released, Tim Leary saw it, and he cheerfully admitted, “I was fooled by Otto Preminger. He's much hipper than me.”
    In 1971, during an interview with Flash magazine, Groucho said, “I think the only hope this country has is Nixon's assassination.” Yet he wasn't subsequently arrested for threatening the life of a president. In view of the indictment against Black Panther David Hilliard for using similar rhetoric, I wrote to the Justice Department to find out the status of their case against Groucho, and received this reply:
    Dear Mr. Krassner:

    Responding to your inquiry, the Supreme Court has held that Title 18 U.S.C., Section 871, prohibits only “true” threats. It is one thing to say that “I (or we) will kill Richard Nixon” when you are the leader of an organization which advocates killing people and overthrowing the Government; it is quite another to utter the words which are attributed to Mr. Marx, an alleged comedian. It was the opinion of both myself and the United States Attorney in Los Angeles (where Marx's words were alleged to have been uttered) that the latter utterance did not constitute a “true” threat.

    Very Truly Yours,
    James L. Browning, Jr.
    United States Attorney

It would later be revealed that the FBI had published pamphlets in the name of the Black Panthers, advocating the killing of cops, and that an FBI file on Groucho Marx had indeed been started, and he actually was labeled a “national security risk.” I phoned Groucho to tell him the good news.
“I deny everything,” he said, “because I lie about everything.” He paused, then added, “And everything I deny is a lie.”
     The last time I saw Groucho was in 1976. He was speaking at the Los Angeles Book Fair. He looked frail and unsmiling, but he was alert and irascible as ever. He took questions from the audience.
“Are you working on a film now?”
“No, I'm answering silly questions.”
“What are your favorite films?”
“Duck Soup. Night at the Opera.”
“What do you think about Richard Nixon?”
“He should be in jail.”
“Is humor an important issue in the presidential campaign?”
“Get your finger out of your mouth.”
“What do you dream about?”
“Not about you.”
“What inspired you to write?”
“A fountain pen. A piece of paper.”
Then I called out a question: “What gives you the most optimism?”
I expected him to say “People” again, but this time he said, “The world.”
     There was hardly any standing room left in the auditorium, yet one fellow was sitting on the floor rather than take the aisle seat occupied by a large Groucho Marx doll.


Remembering George Carlin


     George Carlin died in June 2008. He was a generous friend. When I performed in Los Angeles, he sent a limousine to pick me up at the airport, and I stayed at his home. And such a sweet man. When I opened for him at the Warner-Grand Theater in San Pedro, we were hanging around in his dressing room, where he was nibbling from a vegetable plate. I watched as he continued to be genuinely gracious with every fan who stopped by. If they wanted his autograph, he would gladly sign his name.  If they wanted to be photographed with him, he would assume the pose. If they wanted to have a little chat, he indulged them with congeniality.
I said,  “You really show respect for everybody.”
“Well,” he responded, “that's just the way I would want to be treated.”
As a performer, Carlin was uncompromising, knowing that his audience trusted him not to be afraid of offending them.  In fact, he was excited by that possibility.  The day before one of his live HBO specials, he called and told me to be sure and watch it, because he would devote the first ten minutes of his performance to the subject of abortion.
Carlin had long been vocal in support of the right to smoke and ingest various drugs, and he posed this rhetorical question: “Why are there no recreational drugs in suppository form?”  I was pleased to inform him that teenage girls have been experimenting with tampons soaked in vodka, inserting them vaginally or rectally as a way of getting intoxicated without their parents detecting booze on their breath.
No matter what else Richard Nixon accomplished in his lifetime, his obituaries always mentioned him as the first American president to resign, and no matter what else George Carlin accomplished in his lifetime, his obits always connected him with the Supreme Court ruling on “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on Television.”
When asked in the Green Room at the Warner-Grand Theater by producer Dan Pasley why he didn’t include the word “nigger” in that list, Carlin replied, “There’s nothing funny about it -- that really is a dirty word -- but repressed words about sexual functions and bodily parts were truly funny. I had only been thinking about the ‘dirty’ words in terms of sex and bodily functions, and how uptight these religious freaks have made us.  That’s fun, that’s some funny shit.”
At a private memorial for family and friends, Carlin's daughter Kelly read from his burial instructions, written on May 1, 1990:
Upon my death, I wish to be cremated.  The disposition of my ashes (dispersal at sea, on land or in the air) shall be determined by my surviving family (wife and daughter) in accordance with their knowledge of my prejudices and philosophies regarding geography and spirituality.  Under no circumstances are my ashes to be retained by anyone or buried in a particular location.  The eventual dispersal can be delayed for any reasonable length of time required to reach a decision, but not to exceed one month following my death.

I wish no public service of any kind.  I wish no religious service of any kind. I prefer a private gathering at my home, attended by friends and family members who shall be determined by my surviving family (wife and daughter).  It should be extremely informal, they should play rhythm and blues music, and they should laugh a lot. Vague references to spirituality (secular) will be permitted.  

Kelly added, “There will be no mention of God allowed” and “No one will be allowed to say that ‘George is now smiling down at us from Heaven above.’”
Carlin once told an audience of children how to be a class clown as a way of attracting attention.  “I didn’t start out with fake heart attacks in the aisle,” he explained.  Ah, if only that’s what he was doing this time.
But a reporter did once ask him how he wanted to die.
“I’d like to explode spontaneously in someone’s living room,” he replied.  “That, to me, is the way to go out.”
And, through his CDs, DVDs, books, and online, George Carlin does indeed continue to explode spontaneously in living rooms across the country and around the world. Roasting With Robin


The first time I met Robin Williams was in 1976 at the first annual Comedy Competition in San Francisco. He was sweating profusely, his hairy chest and arms showing, and he wore a brown cowboy hat. I was one of the judges. Although I voted for Williams, he came in second.
     I forget the winner’s name, but I recall that the lights went off in the middle of his act, so he took advantage of the accident, and in the darkness he whispered loudly, “Okay, now, when the lights go back on, everybody shout out, ‘Surprise! Surprise!’” The audience laughed and applauded that ad lib.
     Robin’s disappointment was palpable, but his stardom was inevitable. Our paths continued to cross backstage at benefits where we both performed. He was also a reader of The Realist. In 1988, the word got around that I was going to undergo surgery, and he sent me a generous unsolicited check to help.
In 1998, Anita Hoffman, Abbie’s widow, dying from cancer, decided to take her life on December 27, so as not to spoil Christmas for family and friends who were visiting and bringing all kinds of food. Her appetite was ravenous, and her humor was dark. After devouring a pastrami sandwich, she remarked, “I better brush my teeth, I don’t want to get gum pockets.”
     She was staying at a house in San Francisco owned by actress Wynona Rider, whose godfather was Timothy Leary. He had been Anita’s role model during the final months of his life. “You couldn’t choose how and when and with whom you were born,” he said, “but you can take charge of your own death.” And that’s exactly what she was now doing.
     Robin Williams learned about Anita’s situation from his co-star in Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon, who had been told about it by his girlfriend, Wynona. Robin had never met Anita, but he called and offered to pay a visit, in keeping with his benign case of Patch Adams Syndrome. After all, if Patch could travel to Trinidad to entertain murderers who would be hanged three days later, why shouldn’t it be appropriate for Robin to make Anita laugh on Christmas day? She hesitated—“I’ve never really been a fan of his work,” she thought—but then invited him to visit….
     And so it came to pass in 2014 that Robin Williams would also commit suicide. In the midst of mass mourning him, Rush Limbaugh explained that “Leftists are never happy.” And the anti-choice Lifenews claimed that Robin killed himself out of guilt over an abortion his girlfriend had in the 1970s.
     The last time I saw him was in 1987 on a Saturday evening at the Hollywood Press Club, where we were both participants at a roast for Harlan Ellison, the prolific author of fantasy, science-fiction and speculative-fiction, his work including 1,700 short stories. He also had a reputation for angry ranting with literary style. My wife Nancy said, “He has a black belt in Mouth.”
     The roast was supposedly a fundraiser for his defense in a frivolous libel lawsuit. Although the auditorium was filled at $25 a head, the plaintiff, Michael Fleischer, was suing Ellison for a million dollars. In a 1980 issue of Comics Journal, in a review of Fleischer’s comic-book-novel, Ellison called him “crazy” like H.P. Lovecraft and other renowned writers. Ironically, Harlan had intended it to be a compliment.
     Screenwriter David Gerrold remarked, “The fact that Ellison is a self-made man relieves God of a great responsibility. I’ve been Harlan’s friend for six years. Of course, I’ve known him for eighteen years.”
     The moderator of the roast, film critic Digby Diehl, read a telegram from Isaac Asimov, which concluded, “Kick him in the balls—signed, Frank Sinatra.” Onstage, Asimov’s fellow science-fiction writer Robert Silverberg announced that “Harlan Ellison is so short that he goes up on his girlfriend.” Robin and I were sitting next to each other, and we simultaneously crossed that joke off our imaginary lists.
     There were short-jokes galore. Have a few free samples: “Short? I carry a life-sized portrait of Harlan in my wallet.” “Harlan’s parents were normal, but the milkman was a syphilitic dwarf.” And the producer of Twilight Zone, Phil de Guere, complained, “It took Harlan nine months before he figured out how to shoot himself in the foot at Twilight Zone and get canned. But of all the people I have worked with, Harlan is by far the shortest. Harlan doesn’t have a short fuse. He is a short fuse.”
     My own short-joke was, “Actually, this isn’t a roast. It’s more like a microwave.” Robin said, “Harlan is a tall Paul Williams, a white Paul Simon.” I pointed out that “Harlan is on the right side of a lot of important fights. He’s fought against racism and sexism. That’s why this whole panel is white males.”
     A roast by definition overflows with irreverence, insults, and raunchiness. Examples: “If it’s true that you are what you eat, Harlan would be a vagina.” Stan Lee of comic-book infamy said, “Harlan is a very difficult person to arouse. Ask any of his former wives.” And Robin contributed a metaphorical dick joke: “If you’re hung like a field mouse, don’t stand in the wind.”
     I stated that “Harlan is an egomaniac partially because at the moment of sexual climax, he calls out his own name.” Robin shouted: “Was it good for me?”  I responded, “Harlan has a typewriter with only two letters—M and E. And on it he has somehow managed to write 42 books as well as 300 of Steve Allen’s songs plus a few of Lyndon LaRouche’s speeches.”
     Robert Psycho Block remembered when “Harlan was interested in re-writing other people’s work. He took me into a nearby drugstore and showed me how he had erased all the M’s 
off all the Murine bottles.” I observed that “Harlan has always refused to get involved with the drug world—as a user. However, he is a dealer. In fact, he was the connection for Kathy Evelyn Smith.”
A severe groan emanated from the audience, and I realized that I was treating a roaster as a roastee, not an uncommon practice. Robin Williams and Robert DeNiro had been with Smith and John Belushi on the night of Belushi’s death. “Oh, that’s a good one,” Robin said with understandable Sarcasm 101. “Listen,” I replied, “if she didn’t plea-bargain, you wouldn’t be here tonight.”
Moderator Digby Diehl proceeded to rub salt in Robin’s wound that I had unintentionally caused: “Robin Williams has been called the king of improv, and he has proven it tonight by interrupting everybody, stepping on their lines, doing schtick. He’s been about as annoying he can be.”
“I loved that review, though,” said Robin, referring to Diehl’s negative critique of Club Paradise.
Diehl: “I was hoping you hadn’t seen it, Robin. It’s said of you in Hollywood that you don’t read your scripts. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to bring you Robin Williams, fresh from Club Paradise, his biggest failure yet.”
Williams: “Thank you, Gary Franklin [the movie reviewer Diehl replaced]. What can you say about a man who’s a TV critic? A man who looks at a good film and letters it like a report card. Is that art? I think not. And I’d like to thank Harlan’s lawyer for proving, God, is there a reason for law? I think not. And I’d like to thank Mr. Krassner for all the Kathy Smith references. That’s some funny stuff.”
Robin confessed, “I really don’t know Harlan for shit,” then described his house. “ It’s like Notre Dame done by Sears. There’s Harlan, naked, playing in his toys with a beautiful shiksa goddess jumping up and down saying, ‘I like him. He’s smart.’” Robin morphed into a little boy in the bathroom. “I’m reading Bradbury, dad.” (Roaster Ray Bradbury chortled. Robin suppressed a fake sob.) “It’s just taken me so far down to be here. I wish I could cry but I don’t care.” (The audience applauded.)
“Well,” said Diehl, “it’s been basically a really hostile, ugly night, with a lot of lame jokes and sentimental drivel. But we still have the ritual forgiveness to look forward to.” He introduced Harlan Ellison, “a man with the milk of human kindness dripping from his fangs.”
“Ha, ha. Very funny, I’m sure,” Harlan reacted. “I had a friend once, but the wheels fell off. Zip friends. Dust is my friend. And what of these fuckers here? Robin Williams can’t even get a pair of pants that fits him.”
“There’s a reason for that, Harlan.”
“Yeah, sure. It was for you they made up the phrase, ‘Is it in yet?’ You wanna talk about that, Williams? I’ve got four words for you: Club Paradise and The Survivors.”
     “Yeah, on a double bill with Man With a Dog [Ellison wrote the screenplay].”
     Harlan continued to baste the roasters. As for me, he said, “I want to thank my old chum Krassner for being here tonight. I want to commend him on his restraint in the remarks he made. Or perhaps it was only caution on his part because I promised if he fucked around with me, I’d let on that he caught his herpes from Nancy Reagan.”
     Digby Diehl concluded, “Harlan’s only fear is that he’ll get in a car accident and have to re-live this event. And in the true tradition of roasting, that tradition being to talk dirty and mention a big name, thank you all for coming. And join us next week when our guest roaster will be Mother Teresa.”
     I blurted out, “I fucked her.”
The audience screamed, hooted, stomped, and Robin jumped out of his chair and ran around in a circle. Then he said, “Gandhi is going, ‘Who is this man? He may not get through the gates of heaven for that line.’”
Harlan said, “Thank God Krassner got off one good one.”
I explained, “I guess I just fell into the insult mode.”
“Basically,” said Robert Silverberg, “the roast is a really ugly, repugnant, immature and childish art form. I hate it. And I will only do one if Harlan is the target.”
And on our way home, Nancy summed up the irony: “A compliment was originally perceived as an insult, and consequently we’ve had an evening of insults which were really compliments.”



Remembering Dick Gregory

I first met Dick Gregory when he asked me to interview him for The Realist in New York. I saw him again when I was in Chicago. He was performing at the Playboy Club and invited me to his show. Two years previously, Negro comedians performed only in Negro nightclubs, and Gregory was no exception.
     But one evening the regular white comic at the Playboy Club got sick, and Gregory took his place. It made Time magazine, and he was invited to perform on the Tonight Show, but he declined unless, after doing his stand-up act, he would be asked to sit down and talk with Jack Paar. The gamble worked, and Gregory became an instant celebrity, breaking through the color barrier with humor.
     Eventually we became friends and fellow demonstrators. Now he was performing at the Playboy Club, not as a substitute comic but as a star attraction. They had to supply me with a jacket, and a tie that was decorated all over with bunny symbols. Gregory was already on stage.
     “How could Columbus discover America,” he was asking the audience, “when the Indians were already here?”
     In his dressing room between shows, Gregory took out his wallet and showed me a tattered copy of his favorite poem, “If,” by Rudyard Kipling. I laughed and he looked offended, until I explained that I was laughing because it was also my favorite poem, and “the unforgiving minute” was my favorite poetic phrase.
     Gregory visited me on the lower east side of New York. The entire side of one building on that block featured a fading advertisement for a cleanser personified by the Gold Dust Twins, a pair of little Negro boys. It had originally been painted right on the bricks.
     When he saw it, he said, “They ought to take that whole wall and preserve it in a museum somewhere.”
     *    *   *
     On a work-vacation in the Florida Keys with Abbie and Anita Hoffman in December in 1967. I followed a neighborhood crow down the road, then continued walking to town by myself to use the telephone. First I called Gregory, since it was his city Chicago that we were planning to invade the presidential convention in the 1968 summer. He told me that he had decided to run for president, and he wanted to know if I thought Bob Dylan would make a good vice president.
“Oh, sure, but to tell you the truth, I don't think Dylan would ever get involved in electoral politics.”
Gregory would end up with assassination researcher Mark Lane as his running mate. Next, I called Jerry Rubin in New York to arrange for a meeting when we returned. 
     At our counter-convention we all attended an Unbirthday Party for President Lyndon Johnson at the Coliseum, with Ed Sanders, leader of the Fugs, serving as emcee. The atmosphere was highly emotional. Dick Gregory recited the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence with incredible fervor. Fists were being upraised in the audience as he spoke, and I thrust my own fist into the air for the first time.
     *   *   *
     When my marriage broke up in 1971 I moved to San Francisco and I had my own talk program. Gregory announced on my show that, until the war in Vietnam was over, he was going to stop eating solid foods. I in turn announced that, until the war was over, I was going to eat all of Dick Gregory's meals. Actually, my only real discipline was being silent one day a week. 
     When my young daughter Holly came out to stay with me that summer, she decided to join me on my silent day. We communicated with handwritten notes. Holly wrote, Does laughter count? Since we were making up the rules as we went along, I answered, Yes, but no tickling. Naturally she tried to make me laugh, but I held it in – and got a rush.
All the energy that normally gets dissipated into the air with laughter seemed to surge through my body instead. I decided to stop laughing altogether, just to see what would happen. The more I didn't laugh, the more I found funny. And, paying closer attention to others, I refined my appreciation of laughter as another whole language that could often be more revealing than words. Sometimes I would get a twinge of guilt if I nearly slipped and laughed, and I remembered what I had always known, that children must be taught to be serious. When I mentioned my laugh-fast to Dick Gregory, still on his food-fast, it didn't sound so far-fetched to him.
That's two things people do out of insecurity,” he said. “Eating and laughing.”
“Well, what would happen to us if everyone in our audiences realized that?”
“Brother, we'd go out of business.”
*   *   *
I was invited to a Christmas party in 1977 by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. Gregory was at the party, and Flynt asked each of us to perform, but first he would take the microphone himself. To my surprise-shock that he wanted me to publish his magazine beside The Realist while he traveled around the country to spread his (temporary) born-again Chrisianity.
     On Thanksgiving Day, Gregory had been arrested in front of the White House for protesting the lack of human rights in South Africa. Larry Flynt had a premonition that there would be an assassination attempt on Gregory. Flynt contacted him a couple of weeks later, and they became friends. Gregory was now staying at Flynt's mansion in Columbus, helping him change to a vegetarian diet. Flynt had already taken off forty pounds. On the day before the Christmas party, Gregory was in the middle of giving himself an enema when Flynt walked in.
According to Gregory, “Larry said, ‘Let me tell you about this fantastic guy I've got comin' out, and I don't know what I'm gonna do yet but I just wanna talk with him.’ And I said, ‘Well, who is it?’ He said, ‘Paul Krassner.’ And I just fell out, and said, ‘Are you serious? He's one of the hippest minds in the whole world.’ Then he came back and said, ‘How long you been knowin' him?’ and I told him, ‘All through the sixties,’ you know. And I said it was a fantastic idea.”
For the New Year, Flynt flew Gregory and me to the Bahamas. Gregory was in the kitchen, diligently preparing a health drink for Flynt – this must have been the birth of his Bahamian Diet powder -– and he was also feeding unfiltered conspiracy theories to his eager student.
     At midnight, we all went out on the dock and stood in a misty drizzle as Gregory uttered truly eloquent prayers for each of us. When he finished, Flynt’s wife Althea whined, like Lucy in the Peanuts strip, “My hair's getting all wet.” It was her way of saying “Amen.”
On New Year's Day, we were sitting in the sand, just relaxing. Flynt had bought a paperback novel by Gore Vidal in the hotel store, but first he was reading the Sunday New York Times and worrying about the implications of juries with only six members. A moment later he was rubbing suntan lotion on my back.
“I'll bet Hugh Hefner never did this for you,” he said.
*   *   *
Larry Flynt had been traveling around a lot, but he happened to be back in L.A. at the same time that my friend LSD guru Ram Dass was visiting, so I had the unique pleasure of introducing them. Larry, Althea, Ram Dass and I went to a health-food restaurant, where we discovered that we shared something in common: we were all practicing celibacy – Larry at the suggestion of Dick Gregory, Althea by extension, Ram Dass for spiritual purposes, and me just for the sheer perversity of it.
When Larry got shot down south by a racist nut because Hustler had a black naked model, Althea had transformed the Coca-Cola Suite at Emory University Hospital into her office, where she was now studying the slides of the irreverent “Jesus and the Adulteress” feature. Dick Gregory was there, and he said, “This scares me.” He was concerned about reaction in the Bible Belt, notwithstanding the fact that Hustler's research department had already made certain that the text followed the Bible.
     And now Althea was checking for any sexism that might have slipped past the male editors’ limited consciousness. The spread was already in page forms, but not yet collated into the magazine, and there was still a gnawing dilemma about whether or not to publish it.
The marketing people were aghast at the possibility that wholesalers would refuse to distribute an issue of the magazine with such a blatantly blasphemous feature. Althea and I voted to publish. Gregory and editor Bruce David voted not to publish. “I’m against it,” he said, “because we're this is an issue that just simply will not be distributed.”
Faced with this crucial decision, Althea made her choice on the basis of pure whimsicality. She noticed a pair of pigeons on the window ledge. One of them was waddling toward the other. “All right,” she said, “if that dove walks over and pecks the other dove, then we will publish this.” The pigeon continued strutting along the window ledge, but it stopped short and didn’t peck the other pigeon, so publication of “Jesus and the Adulteress” was postponed indefinitely.
Of course, Dick Gregory continued to spread his diligent activism until he died. He was a loss to me, and to this country, and around the world, but his powerful inspiration remains.


The Missing Episode of Seinfeld


[Jerry Seinfeld is onstage at a comedy club.]
Jerry: Did God look down at Adam and Eve one day and say, “Oops, I forgot something. Let there be erections.” So Adam got the first hard-on in history. But God forgot to say when. And that’s why men don’t always get an erection when they want one. Women don’t know it, but sometimes men have to actually pray for a hard-on. “Please, God, I’ll be sensitive to her needs, I promise, oh God, please, just make it hard . . . ” 
[Cut to George Costanza, having dinner with his parents. There is no conversation, but George’s father is smiling, then chortles out loud.]
George: What! What! What’s so funny? Is it because I’m becoming more like you every day?
George’s father: Should I tell ’im? I’m gonna tell ’im.
George’s mother: No, don’t tell ’im. It’s private between you and me. It’s none of his beeswax.
George: C’mon, stop teasing me, I wanna know, whatever it is, I wanna know, so c’mon, tell me.
George’s father: Okay, I’m gonna tell ’im. I’ve been taking Viagra, George, and it really works. Your mother and I have been making whoopee like it was going out of style.
George’s mother: Yeah, but it’s not me he gets excited over. It’s only because of the Viagra.
George’s father: What difference does it make, George? Listen to this. The pills cost $10 each, but a friend of mine goes to Mexico and he gets me a whole bottle of fifty for $42.
George: Gee, that’s less than a buck a fuck, isn’t it?
George’s mother: George! You must never say the F-word in this kitchen! [To her husband] See, I told you, we never should’ve told ’im.
[Cut to Jerry’s apartment. Kramer bursts through the door.]
Kramer: Jerry! Jerry! I’m gonna be rich! I bought a bunch of shares in Pfizer when it was real low, and now they put Viagra on the market and all the doctors are getting writers’ cramp from writing prescriptions, and the stock is going up and up like it swallowed Viagra! Jerry, I’m gonna be able to retire!
Jerry:  Retire from what? Kramer, you don’t do anything now.
Kramer: Yes, I do. I scheme. I spend a lot of time scheming, Jerry. But now I’ll be able to finance my schemes. I’m gonna be able to call my own bluff, every day! If that’s not retirement, I don’t know what is.
Jerry: Anyway, I might get this Stand-up Comedy Award tonight, and I’m trying to think of what to say that will sound completely spontaneous. So, Kramer, what’s your current scheme?
Kramer: Okay, I got this idea because of the insurance companies. Blue Cross will pay for six Viagra pills a month. Well, that’s very arbitrary, isn’t it? I mean I get six hard-ons in one day.
Jerry: That’s the national average, you know, six hard-ons a day.
Kramer: Jerry, believe me, Kramer don’t have “average” hard-ons. But here’s my merchandising plan. It’s for one-night stands—a combination package of Viagra and RU486, the morning-after pill. It’s a natural for the unisex market.
[Cut to the restaurant. Elaine and George are sitting at the table.]
Elaine: But, George, that’s stealing.
George: Yep. And from my own parents.
Elaine: You have no scruples. How do you know your father isn’t counting the number of times he “makes whoopee” with your mother? He’ll realize that you took some of his Viagra pills when he thinks he has nine more times to go but the bottle has only five pills left?
George: You think he keeps a tally sheet? He’ll never even suspect.
Elaine You’re in denial again—but you have to give me a couple of pills. I would just love to put a Viagra into Jerry and Kramer’s coffee.
George: Oh, really? I thought you had scruples, Elaine. Dosing somebody is unethical, especially friends.
Elaine:  Oh, didn’t I tell you? I had my scruples removed with laser surgery.
George: Seriously, Elaine, what about all the side effects of Viagra?
Elaine: Stop worrying, George. Hurry, let me just have two. Jerry and Kramer will be here any minute.
[Cut to the Stand-up Comedy Award ceremonies. Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer have been sitting at a table, drinking coffee. Suddenly the table rises slightly.]
Jerry:  Kramer, stop that, what are you doing?
George: Maybe he’s holding a one-man séance.
Kramer:  I can’t get it down! Jerry, I can’t get it down!
Elaine: Gosh, Kramer, you must have been thinking about sex, huh?
Kramer: No, I was thinking about my business plan. That’s the only thing that really arouses me. When I’m with a babe, I just think about my latest scheme and I get aroused. But I always let the babe take the credit.
     [Courtney Cox is emceeing the event. Now she’s announcing the winner.]
Courtney: And the Best Stand-up Comedy Award goes to . . . Jerry Seinfeld!
     [Jerry walks up to the stage. Courtney and Jerry embrace warmly. She gives him the statuette. As the audience applause subsides, the blood flow to the spongy tissue in Jerry’s penis increases. He tries unsuccessfully to hide his erection with the statuette.]
Jerry: Thank you all so much. Well, as you can see, I’m very excited about receiving this reward. I feel all tingly. And I have a headache. I’m a little dizzy too. An erection is like a cop. When you want one, it’s never there. But when the last thing in the world you want is a hard-on—a public hard-on—then boing! I’m busted, right here on stage, with a spotlight, in front of five hundred strangers. I feel like I have to vomit. I’ll try to avoid the first few rows. And everything looks blue. Especially my testicles. Is there a groupie in the house? Well, I’m not actually a group. Is there a singly in the house? Who would like to get laid tonight? I’ll point the way. So I’ve become a human dowsing rod. Now I think I’m gonna faint. But even while I’m lying unconscious here on the stage [Jerry is fainting], my penis will still be a stand-up . . .

























               THE LATER YEARS


Are Rape Jokes Funny?

     Abortion was still illegal in 1970. At the time, as both an underground abortion referral service and a stand-up satirist, I faced an undefined paradox. I wouldn’t allow victims to become the target of my humor, yet there was one particular routine I did that called for a “rape-in” of legislators’ wives in order to impregnate them so that they would then convince their husbands to decriminalize abortion.. 
     But feminist friends objected. I resisted at first, because it was such a well-intentioned joke. And then I reconsidered. Even in a joke, why should women be assaulted because men made the laws? Legislators' wives were the victims in that joke, but the legislators themselves were the oppressors, and their hypocrisy was really my target. But for me to stop doing that bit of comedy wasn't chickenshit censorship, it was empathetic editing.
     	Now, more than four decades later, rape-joking triggered a widespread controversy when a woman who prefers to remain anonymous went to a comedy club, expecting to be entertained. She chose the Laugh Factory in Hollywood because Dane Cook was on the bill, but he was followed by Daniel Tosh, and she had never heard of him.
     In an email to her Tumblr blogger friend, she accused Tosh of saying that “rape jokes are always funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape jokes are hilarious.” She was so offended that she felt morally compelled to shout, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!” Tosh paused and then seized the opportunity, responding, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like five guys? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her?” The audience laughed raucously. After all, isn’t anyone who yells at a comedian practically asking to become an immediate target? But this woman was stunned and humiliated, and she left. In the lobby, she demanded to see the manager, who apologized profusely and gave her free tickets for another night--admitting, however, that she understood if this woman never wanted to return.
      In her email, she concluded that, “having to basically flee while Tosh was enthusing about how hilarious it would be if I was gang-raped in that small, claustrophobic room was pretty viscerally terrifying and threatening all the same, even if the actual scenario was unlikely to take place. The suggestion of it is violent enough and was meant to put me in my place.” She added, “Please re-blog and spread the word.” And indeed, it went viral.


      Coincidentally, on the same night that Tosh, in his signature sarcastic approach to reality, provoked the woman, Sarah Silverman was performing at Foxwords Casino, and she touched upon the same taboo subject: “We need more rape jokes. We really do. Needless to say, rape, the most heinous crime imaginable, seems it’s a comic’s dream, though. It’s because it seems when you do rape jokes, that the material is so dangerous and edgy, and the truth is, it’s like the safest area to talk about in comedy ’cause who’s gonna complain about a rape joke? Rape victims? They don’t even report rape. They’re just traditionally not complainers.”


     Ironically, in The Aristocrats, a documentary entirely about a classic joke of the same name, Silverman complained (facetiously) that she was once raped by show-biz legend Joe Franklin. Also, her rape tips for men include, "Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to rape someone, blow the whistle until someone comes to stop you." However, another joke of hers goes like this: “I was raped by a doctor—which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”


     In the magazine Bitch (“Feminist Response to Pop Culture”), an article titled “Laughing It Off: What Happens When Women Tell Rape Jokes?” by Katherine Leyton stated: “Some female comics tell jokes that clearly target rape culture, such as one classic skit by veteran comedian Wanda Sykes, ‘Even as little girls we’re taught we have something everybody wants—you gotta protect it, you gotta be careful, you gotta cherish it. That’s a lot of fucking pressure!  I would like a break! You know what would make my life so much easier? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our pussies were detachable?’ The joke goes on to detail situations where you could leave your ‘detachable pussy’ at home, mainly to avoid the chance of rape.”
                         *   *   *
     In the fall of 1981, I booked myself for a cross-country tour, from New York to Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
     While I was in New York, a nun was raped. When I got to Chicago, the rapist was also there. He had given himself up to the police. On stage I explained the true reason why: “He heard that the Mafia, in a rush of Christian compassion, put a $25,000 contract out on his life.” That part was true. “So now I'm asking the Mafia to use their clout to end the war in El Salvador since four nuns were raped and killed there.” They must’ve heard my request. By the time I got to Los Angeles, the Herald-Examiner was reporting that the Mafia was “probably the largest source of arms for the rebels in El Salvador.”
     In the spring of 1982, there was a Radical Humor Festival at New York University.	That weekend, the festival sponsored an evening of radical comedy. The next day, my performance was analyzed by an unofficial women's caucus. Robin Tyler (“I am not a lesbian comic--I am a comic who is a lesbian”) served as the spokesperson for their conclusions. What had caused a stir was my reference to the use of turkey basters by single mothers-to-be who were attempting to impregnate themselves by artificial insemination. Tyler explained to me, “You have to understand, some women still have a hang-up about penetration.”
Well, I must have been suffering from Delayed Punchline Syndrome, because it wasn't until I was returning on a plane, contemplating the notion that freedom of absurdity transcends gender difference, that I finally did respond, in absentia: “Yeah, but you have to understand, some men still feel threatened by turkey basters.”
*   *   *
     The Onion posted a story about a college dorm that was nicknamed “The Rape Hall.” And an Ironic Times headline stated, “Quaaludes Ends Its Relationship With Bill Cosby.” Earlier in Amy Schumer’s stand-up career, she told this joke: “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.” She has since been accused of racist comedy. “I used to do a lot of short dumb joke like that,” she responded.” I played a dumb white girl onstage. I am evolving as an artist. I am taking responsibility and hope I haven’t hurt anyone. I apologize if I did.”
     Indeed, in an episode of Inside Amy Schumer on Comedy Central, a sketch--Football Town Nights parodying Friday Night Lights--featured a Texas town’s new high school football coach. He informs his teenage squad that he’s going to be doing things differently. There’s going to be a no-huddle offense. Two-a-day practices are mandatory. And there will be no raping. “But we play football!,” one player cries. The rest of the team chimes in: “But we play football!” “What if she thinks it’s rape, but I don’t?” “What about at-away games?” “What if my mom is the DA and won’t prosecute, can I rape?” The whole town bullies this coach for taking something away from the players that they obviously need.
     In another sketch, Schumer plays a flirtatious lawyer ironically defending Cosby by bedazzling the judge as well as the jury. In a one-woman show about rape, Asking For It, responding to Daniel Tosh, award-winning British comic Adrienne Truscott performs with her bare vagina uncovering a photo of Bill Cosby. And on Late Night, Seth Myers rhetorically asks, "Why did Bill Cosby cross the road?” He answers himself, “To avoid a reporter who was asking about sexual assault allegations.” 
     At the National Association of Television Program Executives conference, Jay Leno commented on the allegations against Bill Cosby: “I don't know why it's so hard to believe women. You to go Saudi Arabia and you need two women to testify against a man. Here you need twenty-five [now forty-five].” Leno also used one of Justin Bieber’s song hits for a punchline, pointing out that Bieber “wouldn't want to sing 'I Wanna Be Your ‘Boyfriend'’ to guys in prison.”
     In a routine about political correctness, George Carlin suggested that a euphemism for a rape victim would be “unwilling sperm recipient.” On The View, Joy Behar exclaimed that she would vote for a rapist as long as he supported beloved feminist issues like abortion and the free contraception they bicker so much about.
     On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart aimed his arrow at presidential candidate Donald Trump (who bought 20,000 copies of The Art of the Deal, making it a bestseller). Stewart shouts, “There are probably some non-rapists caught up in that tide, whether they’re unable to rape for medical reasons, or whether they’re just all raped-out.” A clip shows Trump reading out loud from a report that “80% of Central American women and girls are raped crossing into the United Sates.” CNN’s Don Lemon tells Trump, “That’s about women being raped, it’s not about criminals coming across the border or entering the country.”
     Trump: ”Somebody’s doing the raping, Don.” 
      “Touche!,” said Stewart. “I believe we have our campaign slogan: Trump 2016--Somebody’s Doing the Raping.”
     Immediately after The Daily Show came The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore. He plays the same clip just a slightly bit longer: Trump spouting, ”Somebody’s doing the raping, Don. I mean, you know, somebody’s doing the rapiing, You think the women are being raped. Well, who’s doing the raping?” Wilmore repeats: “Who’s doing the raping? Okay, who’s bringing the chips? Who’s bringing the beer? Wait, wait. Who’s doing the raping? Oh, okay, sorry about that. I didn’t know, I had to ask. I have to tell you, though, as far as campaign slogans go: Donald Trump 2016--Who’s Doing the Raping?”  Hey, it sounds familiar already. 
     And on Bill Maher’s Real Time, the reactionary blond witch Ann Coulter defended Trump: “These aren’t people we have to have here. We already have our own rapists and murderers. We don’t need to be bringing in more rapists and murderers.”
*   *   *
     Although Daniel Tosh is a consistently unapologetic performer for the sardonic material he exudes on his Comedy Central series--which features a running theme of rape jokes, even including one about his sister--for this occasion he decided to go the Twitter route: “All the out of context misquotes aside, I’d like to sincerely apologize.” He also tweeted, “The point I was making before I was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them.”
     According to Jamie Masada, owner of the Laugh Factory, Tosh asked the audience, “What you guys wanna talk about?” Someone called out “Rape,” and a woman in the audience started screaming, “No, rape is painful, don’t talk about it.” Then, says Masada, “Daniel came in, and he said, ‘Well, it sounds like she’s been raped by five guys’—something like that. I didn’t hear properly. It was a comment—it wasn’t a joke at the expense of this girl.” Masada claims that she sat through the rest of Tosh’s performance, which received a standing ovation, before she complained to the manager.
     Fellow comedians defended Tosh with their own tweets. Dane Cook: “If you journey through this life easily offended by other peoples words I think it’s best for everyone if you just kill yourself.” Doug Stanhope: “You’re hilarious. If you ever apologize to a heckler again I will rape you.” Louis C.K.: “Your show makes me laugh every time I watch it. And you have pretty eyes”--except that he wrote it after watching Tosh on TV, but before he learned about the Laugh Factory incident. Nevertheless, he was excoriated and accused of being a “rape apologist.” But C.K. himself is no stranger to sexual-assault jokes. Onstage, he has said that he’s against rape--“unless you have a reason, like you wanna fuck someone and they won’t let you, in which case what other option do you have?”
      Conversely, in an episode of his TV series, Louie, he reversed such roles. After leaving a bar with an especially aggressive woman, Laurie (played by Melissa Leo), that he had inadvertently met earlier, she performs fellatio on him in her pickup truck, then insists that he in turn perform cunnilingus on her. And he refuses. So, she attacks him physically with unabashed viciousness, mounts him, and he gives in to her demand. In other words, Laurie rapes Louie. No joke. To watch this scene was positively jaw-dropping. It served as a reminder of how often comedians--and their jaded audiences--find prison-rape jokes not only to be funny, but also, as in the case of pedophile Jerry Sandusky, an act of delayed justice resulting in laughter that morphs into applause. A N.Y. Post headline about pedophile Subway pitchman: “Enjoy a foot long in jail.” And “Don’t drop the soap” even made its way to the animated Family Guy. 


     Meanwhile, reacting to the Tosh tirade, Julie Burton, president of the Women’s Media Center, stated: “If free speech permits a comedian to suggest a woman in his audience should be gang-raped, then it certainly permits us to object, and to ask what message this sends to survivors or to perpetuators. Tosh’s comment was just one extreme example of pop culture’s dismissive treatment of sexualized violence, which desensitizes audiences to enormous human suffering. Internet outcry is encouraging, but popular media needs to push back too.”


     And the original blogger posted another message:


     “My friend and I wanted to thank everyone for there [sic] support and for getting this story out there. We just wanted everyone to know what Daniel Tosh had done and if you didn’t agree then to stop following him. My friend is surprised to have gotten any form of an apology and doesn’t wish to press any further charges against [him].” What? Press charges? Rape is a crime. Rape jokes aren’t. They are the risk of free speech. The blog concluded, “She does plan on returning to comedy shows in the future, but to see comedians that she’s seen before or to at least look up artists before going to their shows.”
     Wait till she finds out that Dane Cook suggested she kill herself.
     *   *   *
     Now, over forty years since I stopped presenting my concept about a rape-in of legislators’ wives, I sent the first draft of this piece around to several friends, and I was particularly touched by a response from Emma Cofod, production manager at my then-publisher, Soft Skull Press:
     “Thank you for sharing this! I truly appreciate your thoughts here. I read about this woman's complaint last week, and the whole event turned my stomach. What Tosh did was personally threatening, which is not OK. But even though I fall neatly into the feminist camp, I think your original joke is hilarious—within context, and coming from a comedian whose philosophy I identify with. Color me conflicted.”
     I think that kind of conflict is healthy. And then there was Louis C.K.’s appearance on The Daily Show. This is what he told Jon Stewart between interruptions:
     “If this [controversy about Tosh] is like a fight between comedians and bloggers--hyperbole and garbage comes out of those two places, just uneducated, unfettered--it’s also a fight between comedians and feminists, because they’re natural enemies, because, stereotypically speaking, feminists can’t take a joke, and on the other side, comedians can’t take criticism. Comedians are big pussies. So to one side you say, ‘If you don’t like a joke, stay out of the comedy clubs.’ To the other side you say, ‘If you don’t like criticism, stop Googling yourself every ten seconds, because nobody’s making you read it.’ It’s positive. To me, all dialogue is positive. I think you should listen.
     “If somebody has the opposite feeling from me, I wanna hear it so I can add to mine. I don’t wanna obliterate theirs with mine, that’s how I feel. Now, a lot of people don’t feel that way. For me, any joke about anything bad is great, that’s how I feel. Any joke about rape, a Holocaust, the Mets--aarrgghh, whatever--any joke about something bad is a positive thing. But now I’ve read some blogs during this whole [controversy] that made me enlightened at things I didn’t know. This woman said how rape is something that polices women’s lives, they have a narrow corridor, they can’t go out late, they can’t go to certain neighborhoods, they can’t dress a certain way, because they might--I never–-that’s part of me now that wasn’t before, and I can still enjoy the rape jokes.
     “But this is also about men and women, because a lot of people are trading blogs with each other, couples are fighting about Daniel Tosh and rape jokes--that’s what I’ve been reading in blogs--but they’re both making a classic gender mistake, because the women are saying, ‘Here’s how I feel about this,’ but they’re also saying, ‘My feelings should be everyone’s primary concern.’ Now the men are making this mistake, they’re saying, ‘Your feelings don’t matter, your feelings are wrong and your feelings are stupid.’ If you’ve ever lived with a woman, you can’t step in shit worse than that, than to tell a woman that her feelings don’t matter. So, to the men I say, ‘Listen to what the women are saying about this.’ To the women I say, “Now that we heard you, shut the fuck up for a minute, and let’s all get back together and kill the Jews.’ That’s all I have to say about it.”
     The audience laughed and applauded, as they did fifty years ago when Lenny Bruce ended a riff on prejudice: “Randy, it won’t matter any more even if you are colored and I’m Jewish, and even if Fritz is Japanese, and Wong is Greek, because then we’re all gonna stick together—and beat up the Polacks.”
     My notion of a rape-in of legislators’ wives in order to impregnate them was no more meant to be taken literally than Louis C.K.’s killing the Jews or Lenny’s beating up the Polacks. Rape-in was a misunderstood metaphor; a pro-choice parable that unfortunately has become timely again, but now my target has been clarified, though it's still those increasingly incredible sexist legislators. 
Words and Phrases That I’ve Coined

     I really don’t like to boast, but in my lifetime, on half a dozen occasions, I have actually added words and phrases to the language. It’s something I always wanted to do. What a thrill it must have been for Dr. Harold Cerumen, who decided that cleaning out earwax should be known as “cerumen disimpaction.” And veterinarian Alice Neuticle who coined the word “neuticles”—cosmetic testicles for a dog that’s been neutered.
     So I’m not asking for credit. Or cash. Since money had been called “dough” and then morphed into “bread,” I figured that “toast” would be the next logical step in that particular linguistic evolution, but my campaign itself became toast, in the sense that “toast” now means history.
     Also, I was intrigued by the process of having a body part named after oneself. How proud Casper Bartholin’s parents must have been to have a son who christened the source of female lubrication that takes the friction out of intercourse as “Bartholin’s glands.” But my idea of calling those two vertical lines between your nose and your mouth “Krassner’s crease” just never became popular.
     Here, then, for better or worse, are my contributions to American culture that did manage to catch on, or at least may be on their way.
     1. In 1958, pornography was gradually becoming legal, but at that stage of the game, the Supreme Court was unwilling to allow 1st Amendment protection of “hard-core” porn—as opposed, I assumed, to the term I invented, “soft-core porn,” which was obviously more respectable, though it seemed kind of sneaky, pretending to be squeaky clean. So I decided to satirize the concept with a new feature in The Realist: “Soft-Core Porn of the Month.” 
     For example, phallic symbolism in newspapers and magazines was a key ingredient of soft-core porn. Sample: A close-up of a stickshift in a 1965 Volkswagen ad was accompanied by the question, “Does the stickshift scare your wife?” Soft-core porn now refers to limited sexuality, as seen in network TV dramas and hotel-room movies that feature jiggling breasts and buttocks but no genitalia. The way to recognize soft-core porn is that it gives men a soft-on.
     2. On the afternoon of December 31, 1967, several activist friends were gathered at Abbie and Anita Hoffman's Lower East Side apartment, smoking Columbian marijuana and planning a counter-convention for the Democratic Party’s event the following summer in Chicago. Our fantasy was to counter their convention of death with our festival of life. While the Democrats would present politicians giving speeches at the convention center, we would present rock bands playing in the park. There would be booths with information about drugs and alternatives to the draft. Our mere presence would be our statement.
     We needed a name, so that reporters could have a who for their journalistic who-what-when-where-and-why lead paragraphs. I felt a brainstorm coming on and went from the living room to the bedroom so that I could concentrate. Our working title was the International Youth Festival. But the initials IYF were a meaningless acronym. I paced back and forth, juggling titles to see if I could come up with words whose initials would make a good acronym. I tried Youth International Festival. YIF. It sounded like KIF. Kids International Festival? Nope, too contrived. Back to YIF. But what could make YIP? Now that would be ideal because then the word Yippie could be derived organically.
     Of course, “Yippie” was already a traditional shout of spontaneous joy, but we could be the Yippies! It had exactly the right attitude. Yippies was the most appropriate name to signify the radicalization of hippies. What a perfect media myth that would be—the Yippies! And then, working backward, it hit me. Youth International Party! It was a natural. Youth: This was essentially a movement of young people involved in a generational struggle. International: It was happening all over the globe, from Mexico to France, from Germany to Japan. And Party: In both senses of the word. We would be a party and we would have a party.
     Yippie was only a label to describe a phenomenon that already existed--an organic coalition of psychedelic dropouts and political activists. There was no separation between our culture and our politics. In the process of cross-pollination, we had come to share an awareness that there was a linear connection between putting kids in prison for smoking marijuana in this country and burning them to death with napalm on the other side of the planet. It was just the ultimate extension of dehumanization. But now reporters had a who for their lead paragraphs. A headline in the Chicago Daily News summed it up: “Yipes! The Yippies Are Coming!” Our myth was becoming a reality.
     3. In 1972, I found myself smoking a combination of marijuana and opium with John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Lennon was absentmindedly holding on to the joint, and I asked him, “Do the British use that expression, 'Don’t bogart that joint,' or is it only an American term--you know, derived from the image of a cigarette dangling from Humphrey Bogart's lip?” He replied, with a twinkle in his eye, “In England, if you remind somebody else to pass a joint, you lose your own turn.” Since Bogart and Lauren Bacall were a classic Hollywood couple, I was inspired by that snippet of dialogue to say, “Don’t bacall that joint.”
     4. Intuitively, I was an advocate of equal rights and opportunities for both genders long before Women’s Liberation became a movement. In 1959, I wrote, “From a completely idealistic viewpoint, classified ads for jobs should not have separate Male and Female classifications, with exceptions such as a wet-nurse.” In 1964, that practice became illegal. Masturbation was a powerful taboo for females, a subdivision of the war on pleasure, while it was somehow expected of males. But if it was okay for guys to jack-off, I wrote in a media fable, Tales of Tongue Fu, in 1974, then it was also okay for girls to jill-off.
     5. In 1979, I covered for a weekly alternative paper the trial of ex-cop Dan White for the double execution of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the gay equivalent of Martin Luther King. In a surprise move, homophobic White’s defense team presented a bio-chemical explanation of his behavior, blaming it on compulsive gobbling down of sugar-filled junk-food snacks. This was a purely accidental tactic. Dale Metcalf, an attorney, told me how he happened to be playing chess with one of White’s attorneys, Steven Scherr.
     Metcalf had just read Orthomolecular Nutrition by Abram Hoffer. He questioned Scherr about White’s diet and learned that, while under stress, White would consume candy bars and soft drinks. Metcalf recommended the book to Scherr, suggesting the author as an expert witness. In his book, Hoffer revealed a personal vendetta against doughnuts, and White had once eaten five doughnuts in a row.
     During the trial, psychiatrist Martin Blinder testified that, on the night before the murders, while White was “getting depressed about the fact he would not be reappointed [as supervisor, after having quit], he just sat there in front of the TV set, bingeing on Twinkies.” In my notebook, I scribbled “Twinkie defense,” and wrote about it in my next report.
     In the wake of the Twinkie defense, a representative of the Continental Baking Company asserted that the notion that overdosing on the cream-filled goodies could lead to murderous behavior was “poppycock” and “crap”—apparently two of the artificial ingredients in Twinkies, along with sodium pyrophosphate and yellow dye—while another spokesperson couldn’t believe “that a rational jury paid serious attention to that issue.” Nevertheless, some jurors did. One remarked after the trial that “It sounded like Dan White had hypoglycemia.”
     Later, the San Francisco Chronicle reported: “During the trial, no one but well-known satirist Paul Krassner—who may have coined the phrase ‘Twinkie defense'—played up that angle. His trial stories appeared in the San Francisco Bay Guardian.”
     6. Twitter is an interesting phenomenon. It’s perfect for those folks with a short attention span, and it’s scary for paranoids who don’t want to be followed. It appeals to minimalists, such as, say, Bob Dylan. I once asked him, “How come you’re taking Hebrew lessons?” He replied, “I can’t speak it.” And when I mentioned the Holocaust, he responded, “I resented it.”
     Tweets range from the trivial (David Gregory announcing that he was going to eat a bagel before moderating Meet the Press) to international conflicts (Iranian citizens reporting on the uprising against their repressive government). It occurred to me that there could be classic haiku tweets—three lines consisting of 5 syllables, 7 syllables and 5 syllables—adding up obviously to no more than 140 characters—and so I decided to embed the phrase I coined in the following (also) twaiku:
              What’s worth sharing now?
              World War Three or stubbed my toe?
              I have Twitter’s Block.

My Brother’s Secret Space Communication Projects



     When my brother George and I were kids, I could recite the alphabet backwards, whereas he read the entire dictionary. We both played the violin, and when he was nine and I was six, we performed at Carnegie Hall. (I was the youngest concert artist in any field to perform there.) Our younger sister Marge took piano lessons and became a legendary figure at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn, teaching music and running the chorus. Now retired, she and two women--one plays the cello, the other a flute—recently performed at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, playing music connected to various phases of Dali’s life. (She also teaches Tai Chi.)
     Marge was the only one in our family who stuck with classical music. Although I was considered a child prodigy, I merely had a technique for playing the violin, but I had a real passion for making people laugh. I put my violin in the closet when I was twelve, and several years later I used it essentially as a prop when I began performing stand-up comedy. George went to the High School of Music & Art, and was offered a four-year scholarship at the Juilliard School’s renowned Music Division, but he really preferred Math and Science. He surprised our parents, announcing his decision to be an electrical engineer, but they were supportive.
     He turned down the scholarship and instead attended CCNY. “Because,” he says, “I thought then that the violin was good for my avocation, not my vocation. With so many brilliant musicians then, you really had to know somebody to get anywhere in that world. It’s not like YouTube today.” While at CCNY, he played with a square dance group and became Official Fiddler for the New York/New Jersey Square Dance Callers Association. He learned that a caller earned twice as much as he did, so he put down his fiddle and took up calling square dances. He was also captain of the varsity boxing team. 
     George went to the University of Michigan for his Master’s Degree. Our mother insisted–-and to please her-–he mailed his laundry home in a light aluminum case she had purchased for that specific purpose. To pay for his tuition, basement apartment and other expenses, he got a teaching fellowship, was a research assistant, sold programs at football games, and bussed tables at a local restaurant, which he quit when the table he cleared was occupied by fellow students.
     He won the all-campus boxing championship, but had to fight in a heavier weight class since no one else weighed as little as he did. “Being a violinist,” he said, “I was worried about my hands. But my opponent in the semi-final match was an oboe player with a concert scheduled for the next day, and he asked me to take it easy on his mouth.”
*   *   *
In October 1957, Russia sent Sputnik into space. It was the first orbiting satellite, circling the earth in 96 minutes, and making 1,440 orbits in three months. This astounding technical feat was totally unanticipated by the United States and ignited the era of the space race.  At the time, George was working as a civilian scientist for the Army Signal Corps in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, in charge of the radio relay program. He had been recruited by their senior executive of Research & Development, an alumnus of the University of Michigan.
     A week after Sputnik, George sent a proposal to the Commanding General, urging a space communication program. The response: Do it! “So,” George recalls, “I created the first Space Electronics organization in the country. It was very strange making presentations to generals and top government officials. At age twenty-nine, as head of the Astro-Electronics Division, I had the civilian rank equal to a colonel, but I looked like a young kid. It was embarrassing to take them to lunch and be carded by the waiter.”
     That wasn’t his only embarrassment: “At the Signal Corps, I accidentally flushed my top secret badge down the toilet. It took a lot of official paperwork and the notation ‘irretrievably lost’ to finally get a new badge. Also, in 1954, the McCarthy paranoia was paramount. I, and fellow civilians--and military personnel, I assume--had to empty our lunchboxes and briefcases for inspection every time we entered the building.”
     Five months after he had begun as a civilian scientist, George was drafted. In the army, he was assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. He was a “leg,” though. Instead of jumping out of an airplane, his job was to maintain all radios, phones and electrical equipment. He also started the U.S. Helicopter Square Dance Team to demonstrate the mobility of helicopters. When assigned KP (Kitchen Police), rather than peel potatoes, he scheduled helicopter square dance practice.
     Eight months after Sputnik, his team began working on the design of the world’s first communication satellite, SCORE (Signal Communications Orbit Relay Equipment). “There were no reference books, precedents, or Google for information. We were the pioneers. It’s interesting that the first known reference to communication satellites was in a 1945 science-fiction story by the British author, Arthur C. Clarke.”
     It took the team only six months to design and build the satellite, which was launched in December 1958 by an Atlas rocket that weighed 9,000 pounds. “The satellite payload became famous for the tape-recorded message from President Dwight Eisenhower, who insisted that this project remain top secret,” George tells me. “He said the launch would be aborted if any word leaked out, because he didn’t want a chance of failure to tarnish our image. As it turned out, one of the two tape recorders did fail, but his Christmas message to the world was the very first transmitted message from space.”
Eisenhower stated: “This is the president of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you via a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one. Through this unique means, I convey to you and all mankind America’s wish for peace on earth and good will toward men everywhere.”
*   *   *
     In 1945, in the wake of World War II, the victors launched Operation Paperclip, recruiting a variety of six hundred scientists from Nazi Germany to work in the United States. President Harry Truman ordered the exclusion of any “member of the Nazi Party or an active supporter of Nazi militarism,” but the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency created false employment and political biographies to circumvent Truman’s command.
     Those scientists were then granted security clearance and infiltrated into hospitals, universities, and the aerospace industry, further developing their techniques in propaganda, mind control, and behavior modification. Among them was Wernher von Braun, who had been a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer who could be linked to the deaths of thousands of concentration camp prisoners. (Fun fact: He married his cousin.) He came to America in 1945 and became a citizen in 1955. He was called the “Father of the U.S. space program.”
In June 1958, by the time those German importees had become entrenched in a slew of American niche communities, I published the first issue of The Realist, including a cartoon that depicted the U.S. Army Guided Missile Research Center with a sign in the window, Help Wanted. A couple of scientists are standing in front of that building, and one is saying to the other, “They would have hired me only I don't speak German.”
Exactly one year later, Wernher von Braun recruited thirteen scientists to work with him on an ultra-top-secret program, Project Horizon, to build a communication station on the moon. Its purpose was a study to determine the feasibility of constructing a scientific/military base. “I was one of the lucky thirteen,” George remembers. “In fact, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist. Von Braun told me that many of his ideas came from science-fiction magazines. 
     “The project was so secret that the thirteen of us could not even tell our bosses--they didn’t have what was called ‘need to know.’ I would tell [my wife] Judith that I was going to Washington, D.C., and then I would change planes to go to Huntsville, Alabama, where much of the work was done. I made up stories about Washington for her, while I really was in Huntsville, which also was the watercress capital of the world. I’d make up a story about the cherry blossoms, or seeing a senator in the street.
     “Unfortunately, when I left the government after nine years (two in the army), I lost my own security rating and need-to-know, so I had no idea if the station was ever built on the moon, and I no longer got cheap watercress.” According to Wikipedia, “The permanent outpost was predicted to cost $6 billion and become operational in December 1966. A lunar landing-and-return vehicle would have shuttled up to 16 astronauts at a time to the base and back. Horizon never progressed past the feasibility stage in an official capacity.”
However, just like George had lied to Judith, he in turn learned in 2014 that he was lied to about the actual purpose of Project Horizon: “[It] was a study to determine the feasibility of constructing a science/military based on the Moon. On June 8, 1959, a group of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) produced for the U.S. Department of the Army a report entitled Project Horizon, a U.S. Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Military Outpost.
“The project proposal states the requirements as: The lunar outpost is required to develop and protect potential United States interests on the moon; to develop techniques in moon-based surveillance of the earth and space, in communications relay, and in operations on the surface of the moon; to serve on a base for exploration of the moon, for further exploration into space and for military operations on the moon if required; and to support scientific investigations on the moon.”
     *   *   *
     “When I had been in the Army, I was assigned to work on top secret military and satellite work,” George tells me, “the FBI did routine checks. One of our neighbors told Judith that the FBI visited them but were told not to let us know of their inquiries. Apparently, you were on their ‘watch list’--based on your ‘radical’ writings, I assume. I learned from my boss at the Signal Corps that my top-secret clearance was in jeopardy. Granting my clearance took about a month longer than normal, but eventually it was granted.”
     Meanwhile, I was placed on the FBI’s RI (Round-up Index), though I had broken no law. Who knows, maybe it was because I published a cartoon depicting a man sitting at a desk, speaking on the phone: “I'm very sorry, but we of the FBI are powerless to act in a case of oral-genital intimacy unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.”
     When Life magazine ran a favorable profile of me in 1968, an FBI agent sent a poison-pen letter to the editor: “To classify Krassner as some sort of ‘social rebel’ is far too cute. He's a nut, a raving, unconfined nut.” But in 1969, the FBI's previous attempt at mere character assassination escalated to a more literal approach. This was not included in my own Co-Intel-Pro (Counter-Intelligence Program) files but, rather, a separate FBI project calculated to cause rifts between the black and Jewish communities.
     The FBI had produced a WANTED poster featuring a large swastika. In the four square spaces of the swastika were photos of Yippie founders Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and me, and SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) leader Mark Rudd. Underneath the swastika was this headline--LAMPSHADES! LAMPSHADES! LAMPSHADES!--and this message:
     “The only solution to Negro problems in America would be the elimination of the Jews. May we suggest the following order of elimination? (After all, we've been this way before.) *All Jews connected with the Establishment. *All Jews connected with Jews connected with the Establishment. *All Jews connected with those immediately above. *All Jews except those in the Movement. *All Jews in the Movement except those who dye their skins black. *All Jews. Look out, Abbie, Jerry, Paul and Mark!” (Shades of Wernher von Braun.)
     It was approved by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's top two aides: “Authority is granted to prepare and distribute on an anonymous basis to selected individuals and organizations in the New Left the leaflet submitted. Assure that all necessary precautions are taken to protect the Bureau as the source of these leaflets. This leaflet suggests facetiously the elimination of these leaders.” And, of course, if a black militant obtained that flyer and eliminated one of those “New Left leaders who are Jewish,” the FBI's bureaucratic ass would be covered: “We said it was a facetious suggestion, didn't we?”



     On top of that, my name was on a list of sixty-five “radical” campus speakers, released by the House Internal Security Committee. The blacklist was published in the New York Times, and picked up by newspapers across the country. It might have been a coincidence, but my campus speaking engagements stopped abruptly.



     	When I was assigned to write a piece for the Los Angeles Times, I titled it “I Was a Comedian for the FBI,” because I mentioned that I had once recognized a pair of FBI agents taking notes while I was performing at the Community Church in New York. My FBI files later stated that I “purported to be humorous about the government.” Since when did taxpayers provide the funds to cover the FBI’s theater critics squad? 



     The banner headline on the cover of that L.A. Times Sunday Calendar section blared out: Paul Krassner--“I Was a Communist for the FB!.” In the San Francisco Chronicle, columnist Herb Caen wrote, “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 sued and laughed my ass off.



     *   *   *



     By 1963, George had risen to Chief Scientist, Astro-Electronics Division at the Signal Corps, and McGraw-Hill contacted him, asking if he would write a book. And indeed, he began working on Introduction to Space Communication, which became the world’s first book on that subject.



     “The problem was the incredible pace of technology,” he says. “While I was writing Chapter 5, the nuggets of wisdom in Chapter 2 were becoming obsolete. The last chapter was called ‘Ad Astra’ (Latin for ‘to the stars’), where I tried to forecast future technology. When the book was published in 1964, most of my future projections were already obsolete. Darwin had no idea about the speed of evolution when applied to technology. By the way, more copies of the book were sold in Russia than in the United States.”



     On George’s last active project, he worked with the original seven astronauts. He was program manager at Simmonds Precision, responsible for the design of the fuel gauging system on the command module where the astronauts were housed. In 1972, Apollo 17, the eleventh manned mission, was the sixth and final lunar landing in the Apollo program. “We were on an extremely tight schedule, and my team worked nearly eighty hours with virtually no sleep to finish on time. We received a rare commendation and bonus from NASA for superior performance ahead of schedule and below budget.”



     Gordon Cooper--one of those seven original astronauts—had piloted the longest and final Mercury space flight in 1963, becoming the first American to sleep in orbit. “He gave me a rare souvenir,” George reminds me, “a dehydrated oatmeal cookie the size of a large dice that he had on a space mission. During a family dinner, I passed around the cookie for everyone to see. Dad was hard of hearing and didn’t hear the story, so he popped the space cookie into his mouth, and it was gone before I could get any words out of my mouth. It was pure grief when it happened, but funny now.”



     As I write this in 2014, George is 85, and if a movie were to be made about him, he’d like to be portrayed by Matt Damon. In October 1988, he was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and given three years to live, but his daughter Devra, a naturopath, convinced him to meet with a macrobiotic counselor, and overnight he changed his diet and lifestyle. Now it’s twenty-six years later.



     He played tennis until six months ago, when he discontinued after a bad fall, because he was playing too aggressively. Currently, his exercise consists of taking walks and lifting dumbbells, though not simultaneously. He remains active, doing business seminars for adult education, providing legal plans for families, small businesses and employees, and calling square dances. But not for helicopters. Or drones.




The Six Dumbest Decisions of My Life

     I’m talking here about seriously dumb decisions, not those minor regrets like that time in 1970 when Esquire magazine assigned me to fly to New Mexico where director Monte Hellman was filming Two-Lane Blacktop, about street-racing. Among the actors was a pair of musicians, James Taylor as a driver, and Dennis Wilson as a mechanic. They both agreed to be interviewed, besides screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer and others.
     During a conversation with Taylor about not laughing at jokes, he said, “My brother once told me a joke that made me laugh.”
     “Wait, don’t tell me now,” I said. “Let’s save it for the interview.”
     However, I was supposed to reveal behind the scenes of making the movie, but I learned that there were a couple of violations of law: A few members of the cast had been tripping on magic mushrooms; and a 17-year-old actress, Laurie Bird, who played “The Girl,” had sex with two members of the crew. Nine years later she would commit suicide.
     Anyway, I decided not to write the article--I was a reporter, not a snitch–-and never did get a chance to do any interviews. Nor did I ever hear the joke that James Taylor’s brother told him and made him laugh. I was mildly disappointed, but what follows are half a dozen of my really dangerous dumb decisions that continue to make me humble.
     1. Early one morning in 1963, at my tiny apartment on the Lower East Side of New York (now the East Village), I was in bed with a young woman I had met at a party, when the phone rang. It was her boyfriend, a lower-echelon Mafioso. He asked if I knew where she was. I told him no, even as she was cuddling next to me. He said he would check his source and call me right back. A few minutes later, he did.
“You were seen with her last night. You spent the night with her. She didn't come home last night. You punk!”
He said that he was coming to my office a few blocks away–-which is where he thought he was calling me–-to talk about it. I told her she'd better leave, and I rushed to the office, but he was already waiting outside the “Mad building” [where MAD magazine was published], peering through the locked outside door into the lobby, expecting the elevator door to open and me to step out and open the door for him. Instead he saw me on the sidewalk coming toward him.
“What are you doing out here?” he said.
“Well, I came out just a minute ago, but you weren't here.”
“I was calling you up because you didn't come out.”
“Oh–-I figured you had the address wrong, so I took a walk around the block.”
“Let's go to your apartment.”
“Don't you want to come up to my office?”
“I said. ‘Let's go to your apartment.’”
“You don't expect to find her there?”
“She leaves traces wherever she goes. By the way, do you have a telephone at your apartment?”
“Oh, yeah, well, it happens to be the same number as my office, incidentally.”
There was a certain tension between us while we were walking to my apartment.
“Tell me,” he said, “do you have many friends who smoke Tareyton cigarettes?”
I suddenly realized what he meant by “She leaves traces.” At the apartment, she was gone, but the bed was unmade and he couldn't help but notice the semen stain on the sheet. Which, of course, was no proof that it was she who had been there. However, the ashtray was filled with Tareyton cigarette butts.
“Do you smoke Tareytons?”
“No,” I answered, “I don't smoke any cigarettes.”
“I guess I caught you with your pants down, didn't I?”
He picked up the phone and dialed a number. He was calling her mother. “I found him,” he said. “What should I do, throw 'im out the window?” I was scared that he might actually do it. He hung up the phone and I didn't know what to expect. I thought, How could a realist have gotten himself into such an unrealistic situation?
We proceeded to have a discussion.
“I got the horns,” he yelled. “I gotta do something! It ain't manly!”
“Look, restraint itself can be a form of manliness.”
“You know,” he said, “I could arrange to have you killed while I was having dinner with your mother and father.”
“Well, actually, they're not having too many people over to the house these days.”
His low chuckle in response to that wisecrack marked a positive turning point in our conversation. He finally forgave me, and we shook hands. Then he borrowed twenty dollars, which we both knew I would never get back, but it was worth not being thrown out the window. I had known he was her boyfriend, and so I vowed never to risk sleeping with a gangster’s girlfriend, especially if she smoked cigarettes;

2. In 1979, I covered the trial of Dan White, )who had assassinated two progressive government officials in San Francisco--Mayor George Moscone (in 1975, as a state senator, he authored a bill to decriminalize marijuana) and Supervisor Harvey Milk (a dedicated gay activist)—and yet, after an incompetent prosecution and a shrewd defense, White was sentenced to only seven years.
That evening, I was unwinding at home, smoking a joint and preparing to write my final report for the Bay Guardian. My reverie was suddenly interrupted by a phone call from Mike Weiss. We had become friends during the trial, which he had covered for Time and Rolling Stone. He was calling from a phone booth across the street from City Hall. I could hear crowds screaming and sirens wailing behind his voice.
He had to yell: “There’s a riot going on! You should get here right away!”
Reluctantly, I took a cab. When I arrived at Civic Center, there were a dozen police cars that had been set on fire, which in turn set off their alarms, underscoring the shouts from a mob of 5,000 gay protesters. On the night that Milk was murdered, they had been among the 30,000 who marched silently to City Hall for a candlelight vigil. Now they were in the middle of a post-verdict riot, utterly furious.
But where were the cops? They were all fuming inside City Hall--where their commander had instructed them to stay–-armed prisoners watching helplessly as angry demonstrators broke the glass trying to ram their way through the locked doors.
     I spotted Weiss and a student from his magazine-writng class, Marilee Strong. The three of us circulated through the crowd. Standing in the middle of the intersection, Chronicle columnist Warren Hinckle was talking with a police official, and he beckoned me to join them. I gathered from their conversation that the cops were about to be released from City Hall. Some were already out. One kept banging his baton on the phone booth where Weiss was calling in his story, and he had to wave his press card before the cop would leave.
I found Marilee and suggested that we get away from the area. As we walked north on Polk Street, the police were beginning to march slowly in formation not too far behind us. But the instant they were out of view from City Hall, they broke ranks and started running toward us, hitting the metal pole of a bus stop with their billy clubs, making loud, scary clangs.
“We better run,” I told Marilee.
“Why? They’re not gonna hit us.”
“Yes, they are! Run! Hurry!”
The police had been let out of their cage and they were absolutely enraged. Marilee got away, but I was struck with a nightstick on the outside of my right knee. I fell to the ground. The cop ran off to injure as many other cockroaches in his kitchen as he could. Another cop came charging and he yelled at me, “Get up! Get up!”
“I’m trying to!” 
He made a threatening gesture with his billy club, and when I tried to protect my head with my arms, he jabbed me viciously on the exposed right side of my ribs. Oh, God, the pain! The cops were running amuck now, in an orgy of indiscriminate sadism, swinging their clubs wildly and screaming, “Get the fuck outa here, you fuckin' faggots, you motherfuckin' cocksuckers!”
I managed to drag myself along the sidewalk. It felt like an electric cattle prod was stuck between my ribs. Marilee drove me to a hospital emergency ward. X-rays indicated that I had a fractured rib and a punctured lung. 
The City of San Francisco was sued for $4.3 million by a man who had been a peaceful observer at the riot following the verdict. He was walking away from the Civic Center area when a cop yelled, “We’re gonna kill all you faggots!”–-and beat him on the head with his nightstick. He was awarded $125,000.
     I had wanted to sue the city, but an attorney requested $75 for a filing fee, and I didn’t have it. I was too foolish not to borrow it, and I decided to forego the lawsuit. I must’ve been crazy.

     3. In 1985, after living in San Francisco for sixteen years, I moved to a walk street in Venice, a block-and-a-half walk to the beach. I rented a top-floor tiny two-room apartment consisting of a kitchen/office where I could see the ocean and a living-room/bedroom which came with a convertible sofa. The bathroom had a bathtub/shower. 
     One afternoon, I took a bus to Santa Monica to eat at a little soul-food restaurant in a food court and to see a Woody Allen movie. When I returned home, I walked up the steps to the top floor, and when I opened the door to my “penthouse” apartment, it was filled with smoke. I had stupidly, utterly recklessly, left a candle burning in a glass ashtray on the arm of the sofa. I didn’t forget to do that. I chose to leave it that way.
     The ashtray had broken in half from the heat, and the sofa was burning, although asbestos material had prevented it from being on fire in a way that would spread the flames. I ran down the steps and got the fire extinguisher off the wall in the hall, ran back up and sprayed the sofa.
     “You should be ashamed of yourself,” I said to myself.
     I was grateful that only the sofa had been destroyed. Also, my pride in expanded consciousness had disintegrated. I’ve never quite forgiven myself for having endangered the lives and property of the tenants in the other four apartments. I had ignored the concept of cause and effect. My bad. Immensely. 

     4. On the morning of April 1st, 1995, I flew to San Francisco. I was scheduled to emcee a benefit for Jack Kerouac’s daughter, Jan, who had been on dialysis treatment for the last few years. On that sunny afternoon, I was stoned in Washington Square Park, wearing the MAD magazine jacket that my daughter Holly had given me for Christmas. The smiling face of Alfred E. Neuman--stating his renowned philosophy, “What--me worry?”--graced the back of my jacket
I was waiting for the arrival of the annual Saint Stupid Day Parade, led this year by Grand Marshal Ken Kesey in an open-topped convertible. The event was sponsored by the First Church of the Last Laugh. Their sound equipment was surrounded by yellow plastic tape warning, ”Police Line--Do Not Cross.” Somebody in a clown costume handed me a three-foot section of that tape.
     The celebration featured music, comedy and a traditional free brunch, along with such favorite rituals as the Sock Exchange and the Leap of Faith. Kesey was also in town to speak at the benefit, which was held only because Jan happened to be the daughter of a ground-breaking literary celebrity, even though he had abandoned her mother when she was pregnant with Jan.
     I said to my friend Julius, who drove me there, “It’s not enough any more just to be a sperm donor.”
Jan had met her father only twice. The first time, she was nine. The second time, six years later, he sat there, drinking a fifth of whiskey and watching The Beverly Hillbillies. Jan would eventually die of kidney failure at the age of forty-four, never having fulfilled her fantasy of becoming drinking buddies with her father, who died when she was a teenager.
     Now, backstage, someone I knew handed me a baggie of what I assumed to be marijuana. I thanked her and put it in my pocket. Ah, yes, one of the perks of the benefit biz. Later, as the final members of the audience were straggling out of the theater, I was sitting with Julius in his car in the parking area at Fort Mason Center.
     He was busy rolling a joint in a cigar-box on the dashboard with the map light on. There was a police car circling around in the distance, but we unwisely ignored it. Suddenly, a moment later, there was a fist knocking heavily on the passenger-side window, and a flashlight shining in my eyes. Shit! Fuck! Caught!
We were ordered outside and, with our arms outstretched against the side of the car, with the face of Alfred E. Neuman smiling at the cop and asking, “What--me worry?” And indeed, the cop was worried. He asked me if I had anything sharp in my pockets.
“Because,” he explained, “I’m gonna get very mad if I get stuck,” obviously referring to a hypodermic needle.
“No,” I said, “there’s only a pen in this pocket”--gesturing toward the left with my head--“and keys in that one.”
He found the coiled-up three feet of yellow plastic tape warning “Police Line--Do Not Cross,” and said, “Where’d you get this?”
“At the Saint Stupid Day Parade.”
“What’s it for?”
“To keep people away.”
But then he found the baggie. And, to my surprise, it contained magic mushrooms. He examined the contents. Then, reeking with sarcasm, he said, “So you like mushrooms, huh?” Under the circumstances, it was such a ridiculous question that I almost laughed, but I realized that, from his point of view, this was a serious offense.
Julius was given a $50 citation for possession of marijuana, but I was arrested on the spot, handcuffed behind my back, and my Miranda rights were read to me. I stood there, heart pounding fast and mouth terminally dry, trying to keep my balance on the cusp of reality and unreality. Fortunately, attorney Doron Weinberg got me off with a $100 fine and nothing on my permanent record.
But I finally understood what that cop meant when he snarled, “So you like mushrooms, huh?” His question was asked with such archetypal hostility that it kept reverberating inside my head. So you like mushrooms, huh? It was not as though I had done anything that might harm another human being. This was simply an authority figure’s need to control. But control what? My pleasure? Or was it deeper than that?
What was his actual message? Back through eons of ancestors--all the way back to what psychedelic researcher Terence McKenna called “the unstoned apes”--this cop was continuing a never-ending attempt to maintain the status quo. He had unintentionally revealed the true nature of the threat he perceived. What he really said to me was, “So you like the evolution of human consciousness, huh?”
     “Well, yeah,” I thought, “now that you mention it, I do. I mean, when you put it like that--So you like the evolution of human consciousness, huh?--sure, I do. I like it a whole lot.” Too bad I had remained silent instead of using my instinct and advising Julius, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

     5. Once, in the men’s room at an airport, I couldn’t help but notice a man standing at a urinal a urinals away from the one where I was carefully aiming my stream with my left hand onto the round marzipan-like disinfectant. But he was allowing his penis to aim itself, because he happened to be busy using both hands to floss his teeth. It was a monument to multi-tasking. 
     I’m embarrassed to admit that, rather then flossing, I would use a dollar bill to clean between my teeth. Instead, I was actually adding bacteria to my mouth, thereby giving a new, literal meaning to the concept of “dirty money.” As a result, my teeth were in terrible shape.


     I had known better. Back in 1971, publisher Stewart Brand had invited Ken Kesey and me to co-edit The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Our managing editor, Hassler (Ron Bevirt’s Merry Prankster name), introduced me to the fine art of flossing.


     “I began cleaning between my teeth with dental floss, and then brushing carefully after every meal for the last nine years,” he told me. “Dental floss is really important because it removes particles of food from between the teeth that can’t be dislodged by the brush. It’s this crap between the teeth that really causes decay.”


     Although I didn’t practice what he preached, I immediately assigned him to write a piece about the process of flossing for The Last Supplement. After all, the Whole Earth Catalog was devoted to informing its readers about a variety of New Age tools. And floss was definitely a useful tool. “Floss comes in two thicknesses,” Hassler wrote. “Thin, called Dental Floss; and thick, called Dental Tape. Recently, I found Dental Floss Unwaxed. All the floss and tape I’ve used in the past were waxed. I find that I prefer the waxed because it slips in and out between my teeth cleanly without leaving any of the floss behind, which I find to be a problem with unwaxed floss. I’ve realized the importance of my teeth in the service of my habit. Munch, slurp, slobber, drool…”


     In 1987, I was a keynote speaker at the annual International Society for Humor Studies conference, held in Tempe, Arizona. I had dinner with a group of five staffers from the Russian humor magazine Krokodil at the Holiday Inn. They all ordered the specialty of the house—pork ribs—which came with huge bibs. The editor was given a bib with the words “Miss America” on it. The art director got a bib with a big iconic “S” for Superman.


     They were really getting a dose of our culture. As we walked along the salad bar, one of the Russians stopped at the corn chowder and asked me, “Is this typical American soup?” As the others gathered around, I didn’t quite know how to answer. “I’m sorry, I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sure it’s typical somewhere in the country.” And then I remembered that multi-tasking man at the airport urinal. “In America,” I told the Russian, “corn chowder comes with dental floss that has little pieces of corn embedded in it, so if you get hungry between meals you can floss and have a snack at the same time.” 


     A few years before I met my wife, Nancy, she had gone to a dentist who required all new patients to take a two-session course in flossing and oral health. Only when he was satisfied that patients would be capable of caring for their teeth properly would he then make their first cleaning appointment. Nancy learned the technique, and recently a friend named her “the Floss Queen.” We came across an ad stating that “If you follow a vegan diet, you may opt for Eco-Dent’s GentleFloss, which uses beeswax instead of animal products.” Who knew?


     The irony behind all this is that Medicare doesn’t cover any dental procedures, even though dentists emphasize how bad teeth can cause illness in other, internal parts of the body. For example, a research team from Columbia University’s School of Public Health released the results of a three-year study of 420 men and women, concluding that the improvement of gum health can help slow the development of atherosclerosis, the build-up of cholesterol-rich plaque along artery walls, which can lead to heart attacks and strokes.


     I still regret that I would eat candy without flossing afterward. Especially a Clark Bar, which could cause a cavity and fill it simultaneously.

     6. I had taped an interview on an electric recorder-transcriber, plus a battery-operated cassette recorder as a back-up precaution, which turned out to be an absolute necessity when the electric recorder conked out right in the middle.
     Later on, I bought a new one to replace it, but first I had to get rid of the old one. My desk consisted of a wooden door supported by a couple of two-drawer filing cabinets. I was just too damn lazy to take all the equipment and books off the desk so that I could move the desk toward me and pull up the wire from behind it.
So I simply cut the wire with a pair of scissors. Bzzzzzt!!! I was shocked, but not injured. Though the recorder had conked out, I had incredibly left the wire still plugged into a socket on the surge protector. Where the scissors had cut the wire, parts of the metal had melted away just a couple of inches from my hand. I might’ve been electrocuted. Yikes!
I could’ve been killed, and the cause would’ve been a simple lack of the practice of mindfulness that I treasure so much. Instead, I had emptied my mind. Oops, wrong discipline. But I was still alive, and I thanked God for that. And then I heard a resplendent voice booming through the clouds: “SHUT UP, YOU SUPERSTITIOUS FOOL! “

Alternative Facts
     Between the choice of a one-man-one-vote (Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia) and fake news of Weapons of Mass Destruction, invasion of Iraq, and horror of ISIS, George Bush was elected president in the year 2000. It was due to the electoral college (a rigged system which originally intended to prevent slaves from voting and evolved to gerrymandering), even though Bush’s opponent, Al Gore, won the national popular vote.