Hoaxer whose pranks included setting up Society for Indecency to Naked Animals

In the late 1950s young jazz drummer Alan Abel, who has died aged 94, was driving through Texas and found the highway blocked by a copulating bull and cow. The horrified expressions on the faces of other motorists gave him an idea. He founded the spoof Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (Sina), which campaigned to ‘‘clothe all naked animals that appear in public, namely horses, cows, dogs and cats, including any animal that stands higher than four inches or is longer than six inches’’.

Abel hired an actor friend to play Sina’s earnest, bespectacled president, G Clifford Prout. He invented slogans – ‘‘A nude horse is a rude horse’’ and ‘‘Decency today means morality tomorrow’’. He air-dropped clothes into a field of cows, added shorts to the Greyhound bus logo, and staged a demonstration outside the White House to urge Jacqueline Kennedy to cover her horse’s private parts.

The hoax – a satirical take on the moral censoriousness of the times – succeeded beyond his wildest expectations. The media was hoodwinked.

Prout appeared on The Tonight Show, the Today Show and Walter Cronkite’s CBS Evening News. Branches of Sina sprang up across the country. A Californian woman donated $40,000 (which Abel returned) before the hoax was eventually exposed. Abel did it, he said, ‘‘to give people a kick in the intellect’’, and to make them laugh.

Thus began Abel’s celebrated, if impecunious, career as one of the world’s great hoaxers – a career that fed on the gullibility of journalists, the credulity of the public and his country’s moral carping.

In 1975, when New York City was reeling from recession, he placed an advertisement in the Village Voice for a course in panhandling. Journalists rushed to ‘‘Omar’s School for Beggars’’ and found a masked man teaching a class of ‘‘students’’ how to ‘‘fib and finagle’’.

When the white supremacist David Duke was running for governor of Louisiana in 1991, Abel invented the ‘‘Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra’’ to promote a ‘‘kinder, gentler’’ image of Duke’s supporters. He paid some musicians to record an out-of-tune version of The William Tell Overture, then sent it to radio stations saying that Duke had been the guest conductor.

Sometimes his pranks proved oddly prescient. In 1993, amid the controversy provoked by Jack Kevorkian’s advocacy of a patient’s right to die, Abel invented a company – with a Florida office and freephone number – called Euthanasia Cruises that offered one-way voyages for those who wanted to expire luxuriously.

And in 2006, posing as an eccentric Texan millionaire named Irwin Leba, he proposed replacing income tax with a National Fat Tax, whereby citizens paid $5 for every pound they weighed. He created a bogus think tank (the Institute for a Healthy America), a website (fattaxfacts.org) and a slogan: ‘‘The More You Weigh, the More You Pay’’.

In his inimitable way, Abel raised hoaxing to an art form. His pranks were elaborate, meticulously planned, flawlessly executed and almost invariably successful. He played the media perfectly – ‘‘I rely on human gullibility, and especially on journalists’ willingness to overlook the facts to get a good story or scoop’’ – and was a brilliant judge of that very fine line between plausibility and absurdity. ‘‘A few hundred years ago I would have been a court jester,’’ he once said. ‘‘They want excitement, they want drama, and I give them that.’’ A lan Abel was born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1924, and raised in nearby Coshocton. His father was a shopkeeper of Lithuanian-Jewish descent. ‘‘He’d put ‘Limit – Two to a Customer’ in front of the things that wouldn’t sell, and they’d be gone in a minute,’’ Abel said. His mother played the piano for silent films.

He joined the military in 1943 and became an army drummer. After the war he obtained a degree in education from Ohio State University and spent the next few years working as a jazz drummer, comedian and odd-job man. Then he encountered the bovines mating on that Texas highway and his long, peculiar career as a hoaxer, satirist and performance artist was launched.

Posing as a golf professional, he taught executives from the manufacturing company Westinghouse how to use ballet positions to improve their game. He invented Yetta Bernstein, a Jewish grandmother from the Bronx who ran for president in 1964 with the slogan ‘‘Vote for Yetta and things will get betta’’. Yetta never appeared in person, but Abel’s wife and regular co-conspirator, Jeanne, impersonated her in countless radio and telephone interviews, demanding national bingo tournaments and a truth serum in congressional drinking fountains.

On another occasion he posed at a press conference as a former White House employee who had obtained the 181⁄2-minute gap in the Watergate tapes; when he played the tape to the excited journalists it had been mysteriously erased.

After Idi Amin was exiled from Uganda in

1979 Abel spotted the dictator’s lookalike on a subway. He hired some actors and a penthouse suite in New York and staged Amin’s ‘‘wedding’’ to a young white woman from Long Island. Even US intelligence officials turned up to that one – or so Abel claimed.

Later, to poke fun at the increasing sensationalism of US talk shows, he infiltrated actors into the audience of one of Phil Donahue’s first live shows in New York City that was about gay pensioners. One by one they fainted as they stood to ask questions, and Donahue was eventually forced to evacuate the studio. Abel labelled the prank FAINT – ‘‘Fight Against Idiotic Neurotic Television’’.

Abel relied on wealthy supporters to finance his stunts, but he made little money from them. He instead earned a modest living from lectures, books and mockumentaries with titles such as Is There Sex After Death?. In 1998 bailiffs seized his home in Westport, Connecticut. ‘‘We’ve always lived hand-tomouth, and we got behind with the banks,’’ he said in Abel Raises Cain, a prizewinning documentary about his pranks that was written and directed by the only child of his

59-year marriage – Jenny, a Los Angeles filmmaker.

One of Abel’s most famous hoaxes was to trick The New York Times into publishing his obituary in 1980, using a dozen accomplices to pose as his grieving widow, the undertaker and others to fool the paper’s fact-checkers. ‘‘It was the culmination of many months of planning and research,’’ he said later. ‘‘I got two more inches of space than the guy who invented the six-pack. Next time I go, nobody will believe it and I’ll become immortal. By the way, my tombstone will read, ‘‘I HAD FUN’’. – The Times

Abel was a brilliant judge of that very fine line between plausibility and absurdity. ‘‘A few hundred years ago I would have been a court jester,’’ he once said.