Anarchist, publisher, comedian, Yippie clown, and “investigative satirist” Paul Krassner has been stirring things up since the early 60s, outliving most of his own iconoclastic generation, among them Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, whose autobiography he edited. (Sahl is technically alive but lost his comic edge at about the time he started cuddling up to Ronald Reagan.) The man who once gleefully published an account in the Realist of the newly sworn-in President Johnson violating Kennedy’s corpse on the flight back from Dallas to D.C. has now turned his guns on today’s public fools–I mean figures. When Orrin Hatch announced during the primaries that there was “too much pornography” in America today, Krassner began trying to figure out what the right amount of pornography would be. The most radical–and almost the last–of the socially conscious stand-up comedians, he not only continues to perform but still puts out the Realist and writes a daily column, “The Unforgiving Minute,” for his wife’s on-line publication (www.nancysnetwork.com). (The latest issue of the Realist gores such sacred cows as the Internet, the German corporations’ slave-labor reparations, and the Peanuts memorial orgy.) Krassner’s new solo show, Campaign in the Ass, is a work in progress that will be recorded by Artemis Records next week; he appears here as part of “New Play 2000,” a festival of new work presented by the Prop Theatre Group and the National New Plays Network. Bailiwick Repertory, Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont, Chicago, 773-883-1090. April 28 and 29: Friday-Saturday, 10:30 PM. $20. –Jack Helbig
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jay Green.