Post by rmarks1 on Sept 17, 2018 18:04:06 GMT -5
He taught people how to be careful while giving us all a laugh at the same time
Bob
Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at 94
Alan Abel, a professional hoaxer who for more than half a century gleefully hoodwinked the American public — not least of all by making himself the subject of an earnest news obituary in The New York Times in 1980 — apparently actually did die, on Friday, at his home in Southbury, Conn. He was 94.
His daughter, Jenny Abel, said the cause was complications of cancer and heart failure....
Today, in the internet age, anyone can be a Nigerian prince. In Mr. Abel’s time, however, the hoaxer’s art — involving intricate planning, hiring actors, donning disguises, printing official-looking letterheads, staging news conferences and having the media swallow the story hook, line and sinker — entailed, for better or worse, a level of old-time craftsmanship whose like will almost certainly not be seen again.
A master psychologist, keen strategist and possessor of an enviable deadpan and a string of handy aliases, Mr. Abel had an almost unrivaled ability to divine exactly what a harried news media wanted to hear and then give it to them, irresistibly gift-wrapped. At the spate of news conferences he orchestrated over the years, the frequent presence of comely women, free food and, in particular, free liquor also did not hurt...
But beneath the attractive packaging lay a box of snakes on springs...
Mr. Abel’s first major hoax, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA — which sought “to clothe all naked animals that appear in public, namely horses, cows, dogs and cats, including any animal that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches” — began in 1959. It starred his friend Buck Henry, then an unknown actor and later a well-known actor and screenwriter, as the group’s puritanical president, G. Clifford Prout.
The campaign, which Mr. Abel intended as a sendup of censorship, proved so convincing that it found a bevy of authentic adherents, with SINA chapters springing up throughout the country. Over the next few years, the organization’s activities (including a 1963 picket of the White House by Mr. Abel, who demanded that the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, clothe her horses) were faithfully reported by news organizations, among them The Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and CBS News. The group was exposed as a hoax by Time magazine in 1963.
“People tell me that Walter Cronkite is still mad at me,” Mr. Abel told The Washington Post in 2006. “He’s not mad at Hitler. He’s not mad at Castro. He’s mad at me because I fooled him with ‘A nude horse is a rude horse.’ ”...
“A few hundred years ago, I would have been a court jester,” he told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2007. His primary intent, Mr. Abel often said, was “to give people a kick in the intellect.”
His best-known kicks included Yetta Bronstein, the phantom Jewish grandmother from the Bronx who ran for president in 1964 and at least once afterward on a platform that included fluoridation, national Bingo tournaments and the installation of truth serum in congressional drinking fountains. (“Vote for Yetta and things will get betta,” read a slogan for the campaign, which attracted a small coterie of actual supporters.)...
There were also the Topless String Quartet, with which, Mr. Abel said, an unsuspecting Frank Sinatra wanted to book a recording session; the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, which, he said, the failed presidential candidate and former Klan grand wizard David Duke briefly accepted an invitation to conduct; Females for Felons, a group of Junior Leaguers who selflessly donated sex to the incarcerated; the mass “fainting” of audience members during a live broadcast of “The Phil Donahue Show”; his “discovery” (he posed as a former White House employee) of the missing 18½ minutes from the Watergate tapes; Euthanasia Cruises (“For people who wanted to expire in luxury,” Mr. Abel’s website recounted); Citizens Against Breastfeeding, which argued that exposure to the “naughty nipple” in infancy caused a plethora of problems later on; and a great many others.
To some observers, Mr. Abel’s antics were a Rabelaisian delight. To others, especially members of the news media who had been taken in, they were an unalloyed menace. But as Mr. Abel well knew, his relationship with the media in general, and the broadcast media in particular, was utterly synergistic, for they needed him as much as he did them.
“They need an audience, and the only way they’re going to get an audience is to have perversions and calamities galore,” Mr. Abel said in “Abel Raises Cain,” a 2005 documentary by Jenny Abel and Jeff Hockett, her husband. “They want excitement; they want drama. And I give them that.”
www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/obituaries/alan-abel-dies.html
Alan Abel, a professional hoaxer who for more than half a century gleefully hoodwinked the American public — not least of all by making himself the subject of an earnest news obituary in The New York Times in 1980 — apparently actually did die, on Friday, at his home in Southbury, Conn. He was 94.
His daughter, Jenny Abel, said the cause was complications of cancer and heart failure....
Today, in the internet age, anyone can be a Nigerian prince. In Mr. Abel’s time, however, the hoaxer’s art — involving intricate planning, hiring actors, donning disguises, printing official-looking letterheads, staging news conferences and having the media swallow the story hook, line and sinker — entailed, for better or worse, a level of old-time craftsmanship whose like will almost certainly not be seen again.
A master psychologist, keen strategist and possessor of an enviable deadpan and a string of handy aliases, Mr. Abel had an almost unrivaled ability to divine exactly what a harried news media wanted to hear and then give it to them, irresistibly gift-wrapped. At the spate of news conferences he orchestrated over the years, the frequent presence of comely women, free food and, in particular, free liquor also did not hurt...
But beneath the attractive packaging lay a box of snakes on springs...
Mr. Abel’s first major hoax, the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, or SINA — which sought “to clothe all naked animals that appear in public, namely horses, cows, dogs and cats, including any animal that stands higher than 4 inches or is longer than 6 inches” — began in 1959. It starred his friend Buck Henry, then an unknown actor and later a well-known actor and screenwriter, as the group’s puritanical president, G. Clifford Prout.
The campaign, which Mr. Abel intended as a sendup of censorship, proved so convincing that it found a bevy of authentic adherents, with SINA chapters springing up throughout the country. Over the next few years, the organization’s activities (including a 1963 picket of the White House by Mr. Abel, who demanded that the first lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, clothe her horses) were faithfully reported by news organizations, among them The Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and CBS News. The group was exposed as a hoax by Time magazine in 1963.
“People tell me that Walter Cronkite is still mad at me,” Mr. Abel told The Washington Post in 2006. “He’s not mad at Hitler. He’s not mad at Castro. He’s mad at me because I fooled him with ‘A nude horse is a rude horse.’ ”...
“A few hundred years ago, I would have been a court jester,” he told The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 2007. His primary intent, Mr. Abel often said, was “to give people a kick in the intellect.”
His best-known kicks included Yetta Bronstein, the phantom Jewish grandmother from the Bronx who ran for president in 1964 and at least once afterward on a platform that included fluoridation, national Bingo tournaments and the installation of truth serum in congressional drinking fountains. (“Vote for Yetta and things will get betta,” read a slogan for the campaign, which attracted a small coterie of actual supporters.)...
There were also the Topless String Quartet, with which, Mr. Abel said, an unsuspecting Frank Sinatra wanted to book a recording session; the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, which, he said, the failed presidential candidate and former Klan grand wizard David Duke briefly accepted an invitation to conduct; Females for Felons, a group of Junior Leaguers who selflessly donated sex to the incarcerated; the mass “fainting” of audience members during a live broadcast of “The Phil Donahue Show”; his “discovery” (he posed as a former White House employee) of the missing 18½ minutes from the Watergate tapes; Euthanasia Cruises (“For people who wanted to expire in luxury,” Mr. Abel’s website recounted); Citizens Against Breastfeeding, which argued that exposure to the “naughty nipple” in infancy caused a plethora of problems later on; and a great many others.
To some observers, Mr. Abel’s antics were a Rabelaisian delight. To others, especially members of the news media who had been taken in, they were an unalloyed menace. But as Mr. Abel well knew, his relationship with the media in general, and the broadcast media in particular, was utterly synergistic, for they needed him as much as he did them.
“They need an audience, and the only way they’re going to get an audience is to have perversions and calamities galore,” Mr. Abel said in “Abel Raises Cain,” a 2005 documentary by Jenny Abel and Jeff Hockett, her husband. “They want excitement; they want drama. And I give them that.”
www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/obituaries/alan-abel-dies.html
Bob