The Realist

the British intellectual monthly founded in 1929
American satirical magazine

The Realist was a magazine of "social political religious criticism and satire", intended as a hybrid of a grown ups version of Mad and Lyle Stuart's anti censorship monthly The Independent. Edited and published by Paul Krassner, and often regarded as a milestone in the American underground or countercultural press of the mid 20th century, it was a nationally distributed newsstand publication as early as 1958. Publication was discontinued in 2001.

First published in the spring of 1958 in New York City in the offices of Mad, Typically, television network executives would react swiftly and fearfully to viewer complaints, no matter how small or unjustified the viewer response. Testing this premise, angry letters containing no specific complaints at all were sent in response to a particular episode of the innocuous game show.

Among the more successful productions issued by Krassner was a red, white, and blue automobile bumper sticker, decorated with stars, which proclaimed "Fuck Communism". In advertising this item, Krassner advised that if anyone displaying the sticker received criticism, the critic should be told, "Go back to Russia, you Commie lover."

His Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster, illustrated by Wally Wood and published in the May 1967 issue, was a highlight of the magazine, so successful that Krassner printed it as a poster that was widely pirated. The poster has been upgraded by Krassner into a new, digitally colored version. There is a section of the image, on the left hand side, that shows Snow White being sexually assaulted by five of the seven dwarfs, whilst the other two engage in anal sex nearby. This scene has been printed (often modified to be more explicit) on t shirts and worn by punks with the title Snow White and the Sir Punks, which have caused some offence. Other cartoonists featured in The Realist included Howard Shoemaker, Dick Guindon, Mort Gerberg, Bhob Stewart, Jonathan Richards and Lou Myers.

Krassner's most successful prank was The Parts That Were Left Out of the Kennedy Book, a grotesque article following the censorship of William Manchester's book on the Kennedy assassination, The Death of a President. At the climax of the short story, Lyndon B. Johnson is on Air Force One sexually penetrating the bullet hole wound in the throat of JFK's corpse. According to Elliot Feldman, "Some members of the mainstream press and other Washington political wonks, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, actually believed this incident to be true." In a 1995 interview for the magazine Adbusters, Krassner commented: "People across the country believed – if only for a moment – that an act of presidential necrophilia had taken place. It worked because Jackie Kennedy had created so much curiosity by censoring the book she authorized – William Manchester's The Death of a President – because what I wrote was a metaphorical truth about LBJ's personality presented in a literary context, and because the imagery was so shocking, it broke through the notion that the war in Vietnam was being conducted by sane men." In 1967, the Canadian campus newspaper The McGill Daily published an excerpt from Krassner's story. The Montreal police confiscated the issue and Rocke Robertson, principal of McGill University, charged student John Fekete, the supplement editor responsible for the publication, before the Senate Discipline Committee.

The Realist was the first satirical magazine to publish conspiracy theories. It was the first magazine to carry Mae Brussell's work on conspiracies,

Lewis Black included an excerpt, precisely the final part, from Krassner's story in his 2005 book Nothing's Sacred.