Paul Krassner on Obama, Orgies, and the Art of Offensive Cartoons – extract by Michael Dooley on November 30, 2012 Read the whole post here and especially look at the pictures.  Click here.

There’s something oddly funny about Paul Krassner. And it’s been going on for more than 50 years. He palled around with Lenny Bruce, the pioneering 1950s “sick” comic, and even edited Bruce’s autobiography, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. He was instrumental in founding the Yippies!, those radical “Groucho Marxists” who fought the establishment in the late 1960s with theatrical, absurdist guerrilla monkeyshines. And as the editor of The Realist he paved the way for The Simpsons, The Daily Show, and Bill Maher. Kurt Vonnegut and Lewis Black are just two of the legions of fans who cite him as a major influence and inspiration. The Realist was a proto-underground magazine of “Free-thought Criticism and Satire” begun in 1958. In its heyday, everyone from Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller to Woody Allen and Dick Gregory to Ken Kesey and Tim Leary to Art Spiegelman and S. Clay Wilson appeared on its cheap newsprint pages. Krassner’s most notorious publishing prank was his “Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book” hoax in 1967, presented as actual excerpts that Jacqueline Kennedy had removed from William Manchester’s The Death of a President prior to publication. Defying conventional norms of taste and decency, its climactic scene involved Jackie discovering LBJ engaged in necrophilia with JFK’s corpse on Air Force One. Many believed it was true, including Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. You can read the full story in Krassner’s newly updated Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut: Misadventures in the Counterculture.

There was an illustration here. Go to the original post to see illustrations. Uncle Paul wants YOU . . . to be offended. One of the updates in the new edition of this memoir concerns the funny encounter he, Hunter Thompson, and I had in New York in the 1967. The same story I told in Keep This Quiet! His version. In his words. Paul just e-mailed this story to pass around. Read more: “Paul Krassner on the Art of Offensive Cartoons.” Buy book on Amazon