One Hand Jerking (5 page)

When the Cuban missile crisis occurred, Richard Guindon created his most popular cartoon for
The Realist
, which I put on the cover. It depicted a reclining nude woman, leaning on her elbow with her back to us—her buttocks a globe with latiduinal and longitudinal lines—as she faced a couple of faceless men, both naked except that one was wearing boxer shorts with stars and stripes while the other had a hammer and sickle tattooed on his chubby arm. The Kennedy-like American was gesturing toward the Khrushchev-like Russian and speaking to the Earth-woman: “It's his turn and then me again.” That cartoon captured a feeling of powerlessness that permeated the country. Two Broadway stars—Orson Bean in
Subways Are for Sleeping
and Anthony Newley in
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off
—had it framed on their dressing-room walls, even while several bookstores and newsstands were displaying that issue face down.

When abortion was illegal, I published a cartoon by Mort Gerberg, depicting a Mother Goose character—the old lady who lived in a shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do—speaking on the phone: “Dr. Burnhill?—uh—you don't know me, but—uh—I've been told that you could—uh—perform a certain operation—” It turned out there was an actual Dr. Burnhill, an obstetrician-gynecologist, who called me in distress after patients started bringing that issue of
The Realist
to his office.

Every succeeding cartoon by Gerberg had a character named Burnhill, except
for his double-page spreads, “The Poverty Pavilion,” “The Junkie Battalion” and “The Fag Battalion.”

New Yorker
regulars sent me their cartoons that were rejected for controversial subject matter, poor taste and taboo violation. Ed Koren had a centaur on the Unemployment line, being asked by the clerk, “Are you sure you looked for work this week?” Another Koren centaur at a cocktail party was saying to a woman, “I find it very difficult to be an intellectual in the United States.” Ed Fisher depicted a Native American ceremony with a few hippies sitting cross-legged among a large group of Indians, with the chief saying to an associate, “Yes, ever since drug-trances were ruled a legitimate practice of our religion, they've been drifting in . . .” Fisher was so prolific that “Ed Fisher's Page” became a regular feature in
The Realist
.

Another
New Yorker
cartoonist who preferred to omit a byline presented a TV talk-show guest saying, “Frankly I didn't give a
damn
about it!” Then we see a family at home watching him say, “Frankly I didn't give a
bleep
about it!” Thought balloons show the mother thinking “Fuck?”; the father thinking “Piss?”; the grandmother thinking “Shit?”; and the little kid thinking “Crap?” That cartoon graced many kitchen refrigerators and office bulletin boards, especially at TV channels.

And Lee Lorenz sent a cartoon—bypassing the
New Yorker
because he
knew
it would be rejected—where, in the corridor of an office building, a man with an attache case is about to enter the office of the Anti-Defamation League, while right directly across from him a man with a briefcase is opening the door to the office of the Italian Anti-Defamation League. The caption: “Wop!” “Kike!”

William M. Gaines was the head of Entertaining Comics, which published a line of crime and horror comic books—plus
Mad
. Here was a comic book that poked creative fun at society in general and comic books in particular. What a kick it was to see “Clark Bent” undressing in a phone booth to change into his “Superduperman” outfit, only to find that it was already occupied by a woman.
Mad
's gang of artists and writers were slicing through American piety with irreverence and imagination.

When
Mad
became a magazine, I started writing free-lance articles for them. My first article was based on the premise, “What if comic strip characters answered those little ads in the back of magazines?” I wrote the script and Wally Wood did the artwork. Orphan Annie sent for Maybelline for her hollow eyes. Dick Tracy sought a nose job. Alley Oop got rid of his superfluous hair, only to
reveal that he had no ears. But Popeye's flat-chested girlfriend, Olive Oyl, wasn't permitted to send away for falsies.

Gaines explained, “My mother would object to that.”

“Yeah,” I complained, “but she's not a typical subscriber.”

“No,” he replied, “but she's a typical mother.”

Other ideas of mine were rejected because the subject matter was considered “too adult.” Since
Mad's
circulation had already gone over the million mark, Gaines intended to keep aiming it at teenagers.

“I guess you don't want to change horses in mid-stream,” I said.

“Not when the horse has a rocket up its ass,” Gaines responded.

John Francis Putnam,
Mad
's art director, wrote a piece about the apocryphal publication of an collection,
Tillie and Mac: Those Little Comic Books That Men Like,
resulting in an obscenity charge. Accompanying this was
Mad
's Sergio Aragones' hysterical full-page parody of the genre, labeled as “Exhibit A,” with “excerpts” ranging from Blondie in bed with her husband's boss—“Now Dagwood, stop complaining! You're disturbing Mister Dithers!”—to Orphan Annie copulating with Sandy, her hollow-eyed canine. “Gee,” Annie says, “a girl's best friend
is
a dog!” And Sandy, wagging his tail, barks back, “Arf! Arf! (Pant, pant)
Aaaarrrf
!”

Recently, Simon & Schuster published an
actual
such anthology,
Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies, 1930s-1950s.
It was a case of satirical prophecy. The introduction is by Pulitzer Prize-winner Art Spiegelman, whose cartoon showing two soldiers smooching on a bench in front of a sign—“Make Love, Not War!”—appeared in
The Realist.
As the Vietnam war escalated, and monks began immolating themselves as the ultimate form of protest, Don Addis depicted a gas station attendant asking a Buddhist holding a gas-can, “Regular?” During the burgeoning days of underground comics, I published Disney adversary Dan O'Neill, S. Clay Wilson, Skip Williamson and Jay Lynch, who contributed a psychedelicized logo.

The Realist
was the first to publish Sam Gross, a mild-mannered accountant who visited my office with his samples one day and eventually replaced Charles Addams as the king of macabre cartoonists. Take, for example, his drawing of a man with a hammer
nailing
a sandwich-board, reading “Christ Died For Our Sins,” onto the back of a religious zealot. Or his Cyclops-inspired gynecologist with one large eye centered on his forehead. Or a Gross full-page spread, “Humor of the Handicapped,” offensive to many, though lauded by disabled readers.

Ed Sorel's first published illustration, “A War for Civilization”—with a parade led by Cardinal Spellman, followed by a biker gang and other assorted stalwarts—appeared on a
Realist
cover, bleeding through to the back cover. Robert Grossman contributed a series of movie posters, starting with the musical, “Ethel and Bob Kennedy in
I Got Rhythm,
produced by 18th Century Fox.” Charles Rodrigues did a sardonic full-page spread, “Up With Violence,” and B. Kliban gave me a cartoon with a door marked “Sperm Bank,” with a nearby slot for “Night Deposits.”

Proceeds from a poster—a cartoon first published in
The Realist
, depicting an anthropomorphic deity sodomizing Uncle Sam, with the legend, “One Nation Under God”—were used to bail the artist, Frank Cieciorka, out of jail after he was arrested for voter registration work in Mississippi.

When Walt Disney died, I somehow expected Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and all the rest of the gang to attend the funeral, with Goofy delivering the eulogy and the Seven Dwarfs serving as pallbearers. Disney's death occurred a few years after
Time
magazine's famous “God Is Dead” cover, and it occurred to me that Disney had indeed acted as the Intelligent Designer of that whole stable of imaginary characters who were now mourning in a state of suspended animation. Disney was
their
Creator and he had repressed all their baser instincts, but now that he had departed, they could finally shed their cumulative inhibitions and participate together in an unspeakable Roman binge, to signify the crumbling of an empire. I contacted
Mad's
Wally Wood and, without mentioning any specific details, I told him my general notion of a memorial orgy at Disneyland. He accepted the assignment and presented me with a magnificently degenerate montage:

Pluto is pissing on a portrait of Mickey Mouse, while the real, bedraggled Mickey is shooting up heroin. His nephews are jerking off as they watch Goofy fucking Minnie Mouse on a combination bed and cash register. The beams shining out from the Magic Castle are actually dollar signs.. Dumbo is simultaneously flying and shitting on an infuriated Donald Duck. Huey, Dewey and Louie are peeking at Daisy Duck's asshole as she watches the Seven Dwarfs groping Snow White. The prince is snatching a peek of Cinderella's snatch while trying a glass slipper on her foot. The Three Little Pigs are humping each other in a daisy chain. Jiminy Cricket leers as Tinker Bell does a striptease and Pinocchio's nose gets longer.

This centerspread became so popular that I decided to publish it as a poster in 1967. (A digitally colored edition of the original poster is now available via my
Web site,
paulkrassner.com
.) The Disney corporation considered a lawsuit but realized that
The Realist
was published on a proverbial shoestring, and besides, why bother causing themselves further public embarrassment? In Baltimore, a news agency distributed that issue with the Disneyland Memorial Orgy removed; I was able to secure the missing pages, and offered them free to any reader who had bought a partial magazine. In Oakland, an anonymous group published a flyer reprinting a few sections of the centerspread, and distributed it in churches and around town.

The police would have moved in for an arrest had it not been for my west coast distributor, Lou Swift, who asked them not to act until they got a
complete
issue of
The Realist.
In Chicago, however, a judge found the whole issue to be obscene—for the cover story was “Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book”—but the ACLU sought a federal injunction restraining authorities from interfering in any way with local distribution. I tried to imagine a prosecutor telling a jury how they might get horny because “look what Goofy and Minnie Mouse are doing,” but even if the memorial orgy
did
arouse prurient interest, the rest of
The Realist
was not
utterly
without redeeming social value.

In 1971, Ken Kesey and I co-edited
The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog,
which would also serve as an issue of
The Realist.
Kesey had been reading a book of African Yoruba stories. The moral of one parable was, “He who shits in the road will meet flies on his return.” With that as a theme, we assigned R. Crumb to draw his version of the Last Supper. He came through with a cover so delightfully irreverent that it could zap Mel Gibson with severe apoplexy. In response to Mr. Natural reciting the moral of that parable, Jesus says, “Tsk! Please, I'm eating!”

Many years later, when Woody Allen was accused of sexually molesting his own child, I wrote a full-page comic strip, “Honey, I Fucked the Kids,” illustrated by Kalynn Campbell. Stewart Brand wanted to reprint it in the
Whole Earth Review
but their printer refused, so they blacked out that entire page and found a new printer for the next issue.

In 2001, I was awaiting inspiration for a cover of the last
Realist.
Norman Rockwell's paintings on the covers of the
Saturday Evening Post
had always been synonymous with saccharine wholesomeness, but now on C-Span I saw his son, Peter, speaking at the National Press Club, and he mentioned that his father's long-standing ambition was to visit an opium den. Ultimately, he was dissuaded from taking that trip by advertisers in the magazine, but I immediately assigned Kalynn Campbell to capture the venerated artist's secret vision in Rockwell's
familiar style. And, indeed, this under-the-surface image of American culture served as an appropriate metaphor for the final issue of
The Realist
.

The way CBS chickened out of telecasting their miniseries,
The Reagans
, you would've thought that the screenplay had referred to the claim, in a biography of Peter Lawford by his widow, that Nancy Reagan “was known for giving the best head in Hollywood.” You would've figured that it must have revealed the details of her affair with Frank Sinatra—he did it
her
way—or maybe, who knows, her apocryphal fling with Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates. You would've been certain there was footage from that gay orgy in which, according to Larry Flynt, Ronald Reagan had participated before he was president.

When I was eight years old, I saw the movie,
Knute Rockne—All American
(the Notre Dame football coach), starring Ronald Reagan as “The Gipper.” Reagan immediately became my first role model—he was handsome and dynamic, with a twinkle in his eye—and I even started combing my hair just like his, using water to maintain a fancy pompadour.

Eventually, I got disillusioned, and when I grew up to be a stand-up comic, Reagan became a favorite target. I didn't have to make stuff up, just report it. For example, he promised, “If I am elected, I will end the inheritance tax, for rich and poor alike.” My career as a TV writer was bracketed by the Reagan family.

In 1980, I was hired as head writer for an HBO special, satirizing the election campaign. The show, titled
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the White House
, took place in a modern newsroom, with Steve Allen as anchor. This was the first time in American history that three major presidential candidates—Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and John Anderson—had all publicly declared themselves to be born-again Christians. So the election was no longer a choice between the lesser of two evils; it had become a matter of choosing between the least of three sinners.