"Mr. Krassner was writing freelance pieces for Mad magazine in 1958 when he realized that there was no equivalent satirical publication for adults..."

"... Mad, he could see, was largely targeted at teenagers. So he started The Realist out of the Mad offices, and it began regular monthly publication. By 1967 its circulation had peaked at 100,000. 'I had no role models and no competition, just an open field mined with taboos waiting to be exploded,' Mr. Krassner wrote in his autobiography.... The Realist’s most famous article was one Mr. Krassner wrote portraying Lyndon B. Johnson as sexually penetrating a bullet wound in John F. Kennedy’s neck while accompanying the assassinated president’s body back to Washington on Air Force One. The headline of the article was 'The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book,' and it claimed — falsely — to be material that had been removed from William Manchester’s book 'The Death of a President.' 'People across the country believed — if only for a moment — that an act of presidential necrophilia had taken place,' Mr. Krassner told an interviewer in 1995. 'The imagery was so shocking, it broke through the notion that the war in Vietnam was being conducted by sane men.'...  In 1967, Mr. Krassner, [Abbie] Hoffman and friends formed an organization to meld hippies and earnest political types. Mr. Krassner dreamed up the name Youth International Party — Yippie for short. Their theatrical shenanigans included streaming to Washington to 'levitate' the Pentagon and organizing a nighttime 'yip-in' at Grand Central Terminal to celebrate spring; it drew some 3,000 revelers, prompting nightstick-swinging police officers to charge the crowd and arrest 17 as protesters yelled 'Fascists!' The press seemed transfixed by their antics. 'It was mutual manipulation,' Mr. Krassner said, reflecting on his life in an interview for this obituary in 2016. 'We gave them good stories and sound bites, and they gave us free publicity.'"

From "Paul Krassner, Anarchist, Prankster and a Yippies Founder, Dies at 87" (NYT). What a towering figure in American culture!

And what a fantastic origin story:

Paul was a violin prodigy, playing a Vivaldi concerto at Carnegie Hall when he was 6, but he gave up practicing regularly because he found his instructor too controlling. Still, he traced his bent for humor to that Carnegie Hall recital. When in midperformance he tried to soothe an itch in his left leg by scratching it with his right foot, the audience burst out laughing, and he realized he loved that sound more than the applause for his playing.

By the way, in the first post of the morning, we were talking about a Nate Silver tweet that contained the line, "There are so many subtle ways that [Mayer's New Yorker article] seeks to manipulate the reader into taking Franken's side." Compare that to Krassner's line, "It was mutual manipulation," which I think we can assume is an intentional evocation of "mutual masturbation."

"It was mutual manipulation. We gave them good stories and sound bites, and they gave us free publicity" — Krassner was talking about the 60s but speaking in 2016. The NYT interviewed him for his obituary when he was 85.  I'd love to see the whole transcript!