Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

When you first meet social satirist Paul Krassner you don’t know whether he’s smiling or grimacing, but after a while you figure it’s somewhere in between.

Like all good satirists, he’s glad there’s something to satirize, such as the currentelectionfiasco (that’s one word now), but, like Bill Clinton, he also feels our pain.

So he comes at you with that in-between look, limping from a past police beating, his voice bearing the quick, sharp tonal qualities of a cobra bite, and you’ve got to figure here is a guy who knows what’s going on.

And he proves that right away, as the presidential election vote slides into chaos, by saying, “Bush is going to have to change his campaign slogan from ‘I trust the American people’ to ‘I trust the electoral college.’ Gore would have to go from ‘I’ll fight for you’ to ‘I’ll fight for me.”’

Writer, editor, people’s philosopher and stand-up comic, Krassner is rooted in the social revolutions of the 1960s, during which he co-founded the Yippie movement. But unlike a lot of the rebels from that era, Krassner hasn’t abandoned its principles.

Up until recently, the man the FBI once called “a raving, unconfined nut” produced the Realist, a counterculture newsletter that took on everything from circumcision to nuclear war, and rattled cages everywhere. First published in 1958, it earned Krassner the title of “father of the underground press.” (When he heard that, he demanded a blood test.)

And now he’s got a book out, “Sex, Drugs & the Twinkie Murders,” that’ll leave you both laughing and wondering, which is, after all, what good satire is all about.

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Brooklyn-born, Krassner, 68, lives in Venice and limps about the country lecturing and interviewing and occasionally hustling a book. His lectures are a cross between indignation and comedy, and sometimes you don’t know where one ends and the other begins. That also is what good satire is all about.

We had lunch on a sunny day at the beach, where I asked what he thought about the currentelectionfiasco. He’s a small man with undisciplined curly hair, which, combined with the limp and the grimace, gives him the look of an angry troll.

He’s eating a piece of pumpkin cheesecake when I ask the question about the election. The waiter has placed the cake in front of him with a pleasant “Good choice,” to which Krassner mutters, “Thank God, I’ve been vindicated.” Between bites, he thinks about The Vote.

“The election has become so much like a game show,” he says, glancing up, “that when Gore called to concede defeat, Bush should have said, ‘Is that your final answer?’ When Gore changed his mind it would have been, ‘Sorry, too late.’ ”

If he were still editing the Realist, all of this would be good stuff for its pages, and Krassner admits he misses it already, even though the last issue came out not too long ago. He stopped publishing it, he says, because the rate of acceleration from underground to mainstream has increased.

“In 1958,” he adds, “I was a lone voice. Now irreverence is an industry.”

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An exponent of Lenny Bruce, Krassner produces comedy sprinkled with expletives and ignored by the mainstream media. We don’t print dirty words. But late-night comics like Dennis Miller and Bill Maher owe him. They’re part of the “industry” that used to be his lone voice of irreverence.

Satire is a child of controlled despair and you figure that a satirist must get jaded after a while. But that’s not the way it is with Krassner. He talks about the idealism and energy he saw among the young at L.A.’s Shadow Convention last August.

“There’s a new explosion of conscience and activism going on,” he says, dropping for a moment that cobra bite. “The kids are better informed than we were, and their enthusiasm is mixed with a sense of moral outrage. I’m optimistic.”

What part will he play in that new explosion? “I’m the court jester,” he says. Then he switches back to a satirical mode, the troll observing its victims: “I see a time in the future where, because there are so many polls, we’ll just vote for the poll we trust, and whoever the winning pollster picks becomes president.”

And: “The only way to achieve true finance reform is to make all political contributions anonymous. Then anyone can go to a senator and say you owe me a favor and he’d never know.”

And: “A lot of people who voted are still undecided.” Then in a tone of wicked satisfaction, the Zen devil of the ‘60s, relishing a moment, adds, “Talk about your Karmic vengeance. . . .”

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com