A Hundred Years of a Hoaxer: The Alan Abel Centennial

Well, not only were Carol O’Connor and James Baldwin born 100 years ago today, but so was Alan Abel (1924-2018) — that’s the emmis.

In the age of Trump and QAnon it may be difficult to remember a time when con jobs could be both funny and fun, but such was the case once, at least in this case. Like Ben Blue, and for that matter Ringo Starr and Keith Moon, Abel was a funny guy who started out…on the drums. For that matter, he’s not to be confused with the OTHER Alan Abel, 1928-2020, who was a classical drummer. This Alan Abel was a jazz guy. He majored in education at Ohio State, but formed a jazz club while there, and won a national snare drum competition. He later played with such distinguished outfits as the bands of Glenn Miller, Sammy Kaye, and Radio City Music Hall. He also composed numerous original pieces of music, and released three LP records between 1958 and 1962.

But something else happened. He started playing practical jokes. On a NATIONAL SCALE. There are so many of them it’s difficult to believe they all succeeded, but apparently they did, so I have gather as many as I could find, and I list them here in rough chronological order:

• late ’50s, posed as a golf pro and “taught” business executives how to use ballet moves to improve their game

• 1959 founds the Society for Indecency to Animals (SINA), an organization that purported to be outraged by the nudity of beasts and solicited donations to clothe them (they returned the money). Abel hired Buck Henry to portray their spokesperson. There was coverage on The Today Show, The CBS Evening News, and The Mike Douglas Show before they were finally exposed in 1962.

• In the 1964 and 1968 elections both Abel and his wife Jeanne played a woman named Yetta Bronstein, and ran a fictional campaign for President as a member of the Best Party, with the slogan “Vote for Yetta and Things Will Get Betta”. The character was a housewife who ran on a platform that included federally subsidized Bingo games, and placing a suggestion box on a small table in front of the White House.

• During Watergate: held a press conference purporting to be held by the actual Deep Throat. 100 reporters showed up

• 1975-88: Posed as Omar of Omar’s School for Beggars, which taught the art of panhandling, on the talk shows of Tom Snyder, Mike Douglas, Morton Downey Jr, and Sally Jesse Raphael

• 1979: faked his own death at Sundance Ski Lodge, hiring actors to portray his grieving wife, and the coroner who collected his body. His death was reported in The New York Times a few days later.

• 1985: Hired several audience members on the Donahue show to faint, causing a disruption in the taping.

• 1993: announces the formation of “Euthanasia Cruises, Ltd.” in Florida, supposedly a cruise ship line that would give the passengers opportunities to jump into the ocean

• 1997: advertised a company that sold Jenny McCarthy’s pee-pee in attractive gift-wrapped jars

• 2000: started a campaign to ban breastfeeding (not just publicly, but privately, as well) at the Republican National Convention

Some other of his handiwork I don’t have dates for:

• Lobbied for a naked postage stamp of Jane Fonda

• Tricked several members of the NYC press corps to rush to the plaza hotel for Idi Amin’s secret wedding

• Posed as the manager of a Topless String Quartet

• Announced a new Olympics for sexual intercourse

• Sold advertising space on bald heads

• Ran for Congress advocating the removal of Wednesday from weeks so people would only have to work four days; putting truth serum in the Senate drinking fountain; and paying Congressman on commission so that the government would get a portion of their graft

Abel was not only repeatedly exposed but he was also exposed himself (ha) in such books as The Great American Hoax (1966), Confessions of a Hoaxer (1970), Don’t Get Mad, Get Even (1983), and How to Thrive on Rejection (1983). He also released several books in characters, themselves hoaxes, such as The President I Almost Was (1966), purportedly by Yetta Bronstein; The Fallacy of Creative Thinking (1972), by “Bruce Spencer”; and The Panhandler’s Handbook (1977), by Omar the Beggar.

That Abel’s activities were intended in the spirit of satire is made manifest by the fact that he made two mockumentary films. The first was Is There Sex After Death? (1971) in which he posed as sexologist from Bureau of Sexological Investigation and drove through New York in his Sexmobile, interviewing people. The cast included himself, Buck Henry, Robert Downey Sr (whose Putney Swope Abel had appeared in), Holly Woodlawn, Mink Stole, magician James Randi, Earl Doud (of the First Family records), publicity stunt wizard Jim Moran, sexploitation star Kathie Fitch, and a Richard Nixon impersonator. It is interesting to me that Woody Allen made Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask the following year). The title of his second film The Faking of the President (1976) was a parody of Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President series. This one avoided the use of stars.

Abel’s satirical targets were clearly the three Ps: politicians, the press , and the public. Sex and prurience about same were clearly major focuses of what he had to say. He liked to have fun at the expense of conservatives, puritans, and oddball American kooks. He was definitely part of the liberalizing movement that also resulted in Screw magazine, and the popularity of the movie Deep Throat (1972). Similar stuff that was happening at the time included the stunts of Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner, Bob Einstein’s Another Nice Mess (1972), and Woody Allen’s little known Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story (1971), which I look forward to writing about sometime soon.

Abel was still alive when his daughter Jenny, and cinematographer Jeff Hockett made the documentary Abel Raises Cain (2005), along with this excellent website, where some of our information came from.

Abel passed away in 2018, and that time, for once, it wasn’t a hoax.

For more on hoaxers and con men, see the Travalanche “Bunkum” section here.