This 60s counterculture group mixed humour with protest

The Yippies packed a wallop, mainly through the originality of their approach. They threatened to pour LSD into US dams so that everyone would get high ... and they tried to elect a pig to the White House.

Yippies, along with their candidate for the presidency, Pigasus, march along in New York in 1968. Picture: Getty

Not to be confused with their contemporaries the Hippies – or the later and despised Yuppies – the Yippies were a counter-cultural protest group born from the anti-war movement in 1960s America. They took their name from the anarchist Youth International Party, and there were never many of them – though they confused the media by holding events outside arenas as crowds left concerts.

The Yippies packed a wallop, mainly through the originality of their approach. For example, they threatened to pour LSD into US dams so that everyone would get high. And speaking of high, they announced plans to levitate the entire Pentagon mystically.

Did I detect the influence of the Goons? The Yippies I knew confirmed their addiction to Spike Milligan – who was delighted when I told him. Spike would have loved their 1968 campaign to elect a pig to the White House. (I know what you’re thinking – recently life has imitated art). With a nod to Caligula’s horse, Incitatus, the nominee was named …Pigasus.

I was friends with the late Bill Etra, a video pioneer who spent his life undermining and satirising authority in all its forms. My favourite Etra stunt? Somehow, he got hold of some special NASA glue that was used to fix heat-protecting tiles onto the nosecones of spacecraft. Bill and his co-conspirators applied it to the wheels of police cars parked outside an NYPD station – and fled the crime scene in a rusty Volkswagen. In one of the funniest chases since the Keystone Cops the New York cops jumped into their vehicle to pursue the miscreants – only to drive out of their tyres.

The Yippies packed a wallop, mainly through the originality of their approach. Picture: Getty

Another of Bill’s brilliant ideas was to fill a skyscraper’s lift well with quick-hardening foam used in product packaging. Just pour in the powder and add water. Whoosh! Lift well blocked. (Such innovative antics and satirical subversion often went unreported. The cops and the FBI didn’t want to give the Yippies what Margaret Thatcher, responding to the more serious threats by the IRA, would later call “the oxygen of publicity”).

Quite a few big names (including Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman) were identified with the Youth International Party, which branched into a score of US cities. Reviled by the traditional Left as “the Groucho Marxists”, the group had its own newspaper and flag. (Think Canada’s maple leaf, only replaced by a sprig of marijuana – legalising pot was another political ambition of the Yippies.)

The protests became more serious, and the police became more violent. Members rallied over the Kent State shootings of 1970 and the Nixon-Kissinger invasion of Cambodia. The joking was over. Pie throwing, another example of Yippie slapstick, wasn’t enough.

They turned their attention to satirising the institutions and the very concept of American democracy, demonstrating outside the home of Watergate conspirator John Mitchell and continuing their protests at presidential inaugurations and elections. I liked their campaign to write NONE OF THE ABOVE on the ballot paper. And their idea of NO-ONE FOR PRESIDENT – which proved quite popular in the wake of the Nixon scandals. The slogan was memorable, like the final words from Some Like It Hot: “Nobody’s perfect”