One of the more outlandish and short-lived groups of the 1960s American counterculture, Yippies were members of the Youth International Party, which was officially formed in January of 1968 by founding members Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in Washington, D.C. The group was essentially defunct as an activist organization within three years. During their brief life span, the Yippies were an influential presence at some of the later New Left's key protests, notably the mass demonstration at the Chicago Democratic Convention in August 1968, and the March on the Pentagon in October 1967, a demonstration which Rubin claimed as the birth of Yippie politics. Frequently reviled by other New Left activist groupings for the countercultural spirit and the carnival ethic which infused their activism, the Yippies were renowned for a surreal style of political dissent whose principle weapon was the public (and publicity-driven) mockery of institutional authority of any kind...