Sharp Mind, Sharper Tongue

I was the only one wearing polyester at the Paul Krassner party. I had on the dark blazer that I take to places where I’m not sure what to wear. Everyone else was in denim, except for those in corduroy. At least one man wore overalls. I had on Dockers.

It was Krassner night at the Midnight Special, a bookstore in Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade that furnishes a back room where authors can hustle their latest work. I’ve hustled there too, groveling like a pig to make 12 cents on the dollar.

Krassner, to continue with animal metaphors, is like an old bird of cultural prey, hovering over a society fat with potential victims: FBI agents, greedy industrialists, horny and nonhorny politicians, celebrities, filmmakers, educators and anyone else who has fed at the public trough.

They’re all in his new book, “Murder at the Conspiracy Convention,” a collection of essays, observations and hallucinations that reestablish this enfant terrible of the 1960s as the last voice of the revolution that rocked America 40 years ago. And he’s still rocking.

Krassner is 69, but none of his timing was off as he hurtled through an hour and a half of the kind of ad-libbed monologue that makes hip, quick-shooting cultural observers like Dennis Miller seem slow and ponderous.

The back room was jammed with mostly middle-age people looking for a new uprising, the same kinds of edgy thinkers who marched for peace and love and justice back then, but who mostly now sit and listen. Time does that to a person.

Krassner shot new life into them, and when it came time for the Q-and-A period, they were at him like wild dogs (animal metaphor No. 3), asking, stating, demanding, declaring, clarifying. They could hear the drums of insurgency again, rattling faintly in memory.

Paul Krassner, limping through life like an angry troll, has become a kind of icon of the counterculturists, the one who never surrendered. He’s a small man with curly hair and an expression that’s somewhere between grin and grimace. The limp is from a police beating years ago when his forum was as much the street as the podium.

He co-founded the Yippie movement and was one of those who turned Chicago’s 1968 Democratic National Convention into a showcase for anti-Vietnam War activists. But while other voices faded into silence, Krassner went on to found the Realist, a satirical journal that resonated with humor and outrage, and to fill books and magazines with views from the radical left.

He’s an enemy of the absurd, as all good satirists must be, whether he’s reporting on a guy flossing while urinating in an airport men’s room or doing shtick on a convention speaker telling his audience he’s a CIA mind-controlled sex slave.

The latter occurred at the so-called Conspiracy Convention last year in San Jose, where a second speaker riffed on sex between humans and lizards from outer space.

Krassner prides himself on being an investigative satirist, but he’s a stand-up comic too, and occasionally truth and whimsy overlap. I wasn’t always sure what was real and what sprang from the ironies that existed in his head, a world into which all the fools and true believers somehow fit.

His delivery that night at the Midnight Special was a microcosm of the book itself, funny and far-ranging comments on the news of a world in abject confusion:

On the Catholic Church pedophilia scandal: “What do they put in those wafers anyhow?”

On the display of American flags after the 9/11 attacks: “Am I alone in this, or do you find it ironic that the flags are made in China by slave labor?”

On the claims of the Jews in the Middle East: “God didn’t promise them the land. He just said he’d do what he could.”

An exponent of Lenny Bruce humor, he has a monologue filled with the kind of expletives that rarely make the straight press, and sure as, er, heck don’t make ours. A highlight of the evening, for instance, was when the audience joined him in giving a loud and somewhat boisterous verbal finger to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft.

It’s hard to believe sometimes that the guy limping into battle with popes and presidents began as a concert violinist. He’s been playing since age 3, and at 6 was the youngest concert artist ever to perform in Carnegie Hall. He gave it up when, scratching one itchy leg with the other while performing on stage, he made the audience laugh, loved the sound and has been at it ever since.

In his foreword to “Conspiracy,” fellow comic George Carlin talks about Krassner’s “informed sense of outrage, his intelligent dissent and his ever-lively spirit of civic mischief.”

It’s all there, all right, just as it has been for the last four decades. He brought it back again in Santa Monica with wit and irony. I was almost sorry I’d worn that stupid polyester blazer.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com