Abel Raises Cain: Today's Type of News Yesterday

Abel Raises Cain  (2005)

Directed by Jenny Abel

Crashcourse Documentaries, 82 minutes, Not-rated (but totally PG-13)

★★ ½

When Alan Abel died on September 14, 2018, the New York Times obituary was headed: "Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at 94." The Times was alluding to an embarrassing moment from its past. In 1980, Abel fed the paper a fake obituary, complete with the hysterical tidbit that he had died while filming a vampire film titled Who Will Bite Your Neck, Dear, When All My Teeth are Gone? To its credit, the Times did use a fact-checker, who was hoodwinked by the actors Abel hired to portray everyone from the undertaker to his grieving widow.

When Abel passed for real, some newspapers credited him with having invented "fake news." That's not true, and it's also self-serving. Abel was a hoaxster, but a good-natured one whose aim was, in his words, to give the public "a kick in the intellect." Jenny Abel documented her father's eccentricities more than a decade ago. As she makes clear, her childhood was filled with hilarity, but not a lot of money; her dad refused to cash in on his elaborate pranks and her mother, Jeanne, was his number one enabler. And what wonderful bamboozles they were.

In 1959, for example, he formed the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA), and launched crude staged protests with signs depicting cows in muumuus and dogs wearing shorts. He kept SINA going for more than a decade. In 1963, self-proclaimed supporters even picketed the White House. Those supporters were apparently grammatically challenged, as the conjunction "for" and the preposition "to" are jokes within a joke that suggested that SINA was in favor of indecency! As SINA attracted media attention, Abel called upon a friend to help him script the organization's material: a then unknown Buck Henry using the pseudonym G. Clifford Prout.

A sampling of other Abel hoaxes included a fake celebrity lottery winner, the Topless String Quintet, the International Sex Bowl, and the write-in presidential campaigns of Yetta Bronstein in 1964 and 1968. In taped interviews Yetta—Jeanne in an outrageous Yiddish grandmother guise—proclaimed: "Vote for Yetta and things will get betta." Aside from SINA, Abel's most flamboyant pranks were Omar's School for Beggars, a training course for panhandlers, and the Ku Klux Klan Symphony Orchestra, which briefly tricked David Duke into accepting an offer to guest conduct! During the Watergate hearings, Abel struck again and posed as a Beltway insider who claimed to possess the missing 18 ½ minutes of tape that would incriminate President Nixon.

Sound outrageous and unbelievable? Maybe not these days. If there is any solace, it wasn't any better back then. The media ate it up. Abel appeared on shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Phil Donohue, Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, and Morton Downey, Jr. Even news anchors such as Tom Snyder and Walter Cronkite fell prey. Some were infuriated when they discovered they'd been had. Isn't it often the case that people get angry with others when their own laziness is to blame? Abel was often filmed wearing cheesy and obvious disguises. Worse still, he was on air dozens of times without disguise and under his own name, though he had written several books about his practical jokes and was known to the media. He got away with it because journalists often failed to do their homework. Scholars have written about Watergate's deleterious effects on news-gathering. Abel was indeed a kick in the intellect but, alas, the joke was on him; sensationalism triumphed.

You will have noticed I've said little about the documentary. You can and should watch it on Vimeo to appreciate how Abel was the P. T. Barnum of the television age. It is, though, a rather crude effort—as family documentaries often are. It is the only film Jenny Abel ever directed, and she is among a long line of directors who stumbled because she couldn't get sufficient distance from her subject. There is a lot of repetition and her film frequently fragments both chronology and the narrative, and I don't mean in any arty or hipster fashion. It often feels like the work of a film school novice. What is good about it, though, is that Jenny Abel had access to rich archival material and her father's own notes, videotapes, and presence.

Abel Raises Cain is ultimately about an eccentric jokester. It is both funny and a sobering prelude to the age of Trump. If it disturbs you, don't blame Alan Abel. It's our own damn fault for not paying closer attention.

Rob Weir