‘Professional hoaxer’ clothed animals and ran a bogus presidential campaign
His props included pantaloons for a kangaroo, a burlap sack for a deer, Bermuda shorts for a horse and a muumuu for a cow. And with a purported army of tens of thousands of followers, Alan Abel – who has died aged 94 – set out on a moralistic crusade to clothe ‘‘any animal that stands higher than 4 inches or longer than 6’’.
His organisation, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, had a name that was apparently antithetical to its mission, and a president – a prudish, bespectacled gentleman named G Clifford Prout – who declared that ‘‘a nude horse is a rude horse’’. Supporters Alan Abel went on to draw shorts over Greyhound’s Hoaxer canine logos; b August 2, 1924 organise a d September 14, 2018 protest at the Kennedy White House, where they urged the first lady to clothe her bay gelding; and airdrop clothing onto a cow pasture, because ‘‘decency today means morality tomorrow’’.
It was all a hoax – the first in a long series of escapades that would establish Abel as one of the world’s most outre pranksters.
‘‘I like to give people a kick in the intellect,’’ Abel later explained. ‘‘It’s an adventure in absurdity, an adult fairy tale . . . Besides, the sane and sensible people don’t seem to be enjoying themselves very much. When was the last time you saw a banker smile? Or a lawyer laugh?’’
His death has been reported before – nearly 40 years ago, when he managed to get his obituary printed in the New York Times .It reported that he suffered a fatal heart attack while scouting locations for a horror movie he was said to be filming, titled Who’s Going to Bite Your Neck, Dear, When All of My Teeth Are Gone?
The reports were retracted after Abel appeared at a news conference to disprove his premature passing. ‘‘Now,’’ he lamented, ‘‘when I really die, I’m afraid no-one will believe it.’’
This time around, it was confirmed by a funeral home in Connecticut and by his daughter, Jenny, who said he suffered from congestive heart failure as well as bladder and prostate cancer.
A self-described ‘‘20th-century court jester’’, Abel said he realised he had a penchant for making people laugh while in college, when he accidentally fell into the orchestra pit as he walked onstage to deliver a lecture on music. He worked as a concert drummer and percussionist before becoming a full-time hoax artist.
Among his earliest hoaxes was a political campaign for Yetta Bronstein, a fictitious Jewish homemaker from the Bronx who sought the presidency in 1964 and 1968. With slogans such as ‘‘Vote for Yetta and things will get betta,’’ Bronstein – voiced by Abel’s wife and frequent collaborator, Jeanne – ran on a platform that included replacing congressmen’s salaries with commissions and putting truth serum into the Senate water fountain.
Amid John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s bed-in interviews and nude photo shoots, Abel devised the First Topless String Quartet, and later the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, created in 1991 as bait to hook David Duke, the Klan’s former grand wizard, then running for Louisiana governor. According to Abel, Duke accepted an invitation to conduct the group before realising it was a joke.
There was also Females for Felons, which sought to provide ‘‘sexual gratification’’ for inmates deprived of carnal pleasures; Omar’s School for Beggars, which taught the nouveau pauvre where and how to panhandle; and Euthanasia Cruises, a Florida cruise line ‘‘for people who wanted to expire in luxury’’, as his website put it.
While Abel received some financial support from well-heeled backers, a group of people ‘‘who lived vicariously through his hoaxing’’, as his daughter put it, he struggled at times to pay the bills. He eventually lost his house to creditors.
His pranks, he said, were never about the money – and he never accepted any of the donations made out to him or his organisations. ‘‘Even with clothing naked animals, there were people who wanted to send in money,’’ he told Esquire. ‘‘A woman in Santa Barbara sent a $40,000 cheque. I fondled it for about five minutes and then sent it back.’’
Alan Irwin Abel was born in Zanesville, Ohio. His mother wrote book reviews and accompanied silent films on the piano; his father, the son of a Lithuanian immigrant, ran a general store.
‘‘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 told the New Yorker. ‘‘Maybe the learning experience in this is that you shouldn’t believe everything you read.’’
While conducting his pranks, Abel also led creativity workshops at the New School in New York and lectured on advertising and promotion. He wrote several books, including The Great American Hoax (1966) and The Confessions of a Hoaxer (1970), and penned a humour column for the San Francisco Chronicle and Gannett newspapers.
With his wife, he produced and directed the mockumentary films Is There Sex After Death? (1971) and The Faking of the President (1976). He was featured in the 2005 documentary Abel Raises Cain, directed by his daughter and her husband, Jeff Hockett.
In addition to his daughter, survivors include his wife of 59 years, and a grandson.
Abel continued his pranks well into the 21st century, proposing a ‘‘fat tax’’ to balance the federal budget by taxing the obese, and creating a group called Citizens Against Breastfeeding to warn against the dangers of ‘‘the naughty nipple’’.
‘‘When people tell me I’m crazy,’’ he told the New Yorker, ‘‘I say, ‘Me crazy? You know what I think is crazy? I think bowling is crazy – taking a ball and rolling it down the floor. That’s crazy. Exploring the mind is not crazy.’ ’’ – Washington Post
He faked his death nearly 40 years ago. ‘‘Now,’’ he lamented, ‘‘when I really die, I’m afraid no-one will believe it.’’