Counter-Culture's Paul Krassner Nears 80

Decades before Jon Stewart brought his popular admixture of satire and journalism to the mass media on Comedy Central, the unique hybrid of the two genres could be found regularly in only one very hip and often outrageous media outlet.

But Paul Krassner, the self-described “investigative satirist” who pretty much invented the form in his late 1950s magazine, The Realist, did not stop at being just an entertainer. Krassner, whose 80th birthday will arrive on April 9, was also a child prodigy classical violinist; a stand-up comic who learned his craft at the knee of Lenny Bruce; a fellow traveler with novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on their path-breaking, hallucinogenic cross-country tour in Kesey’s psychedelic painted bus, and a cofounder, with Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, of the Youth International Party, which in 1968 nominated a pig for president in Chicago’s Grant Park, amid clouds of tear gas and hails of nightsticks from Chicago’s finest during the 1968 Democratic Party National Convention.

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