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.”

Avery Corman, the author of “Kramer vs. Kramer” and other books, whose first essays appeared in The Realist, called Mr. Krassner “a cultural pioneer.”

“The pieces he wrote himself and the material written by others were saying to people that what we’re told by the establishment and the media may not be true, may be distorted, and at that time that was not an accepted idea,” Mr. Corman said in a 2016 interview. “For young people trying to dope out what the world was like, being a Realist reader was a way of distinguishing yourself: ‘I’m not gullible, I’m skeptical.’”

By the 1970s, The Realist was struggling financially and being published more haphazardly; for years it did not come out at all. In the mid-1980s it was revived as a newsletter. It ceased publication in 2001.

Mr. Krassner was also the keeper of the legacy of one of his mentors, Lenny Bruce. He edited Bruce’s autobiography, “How to Talk Dirty and Influence People” (1965), and was nominated for a Grammy Award for his 5,000-word liner notes to a collection of Bruce’s nightclub routines, “Let the Buyer Beware.”