As WoW writer Trey Speegle reported yesterday, the great Buck Henry has left the building. Henry was a showbiz legend: the screenwriter of The Graduate (1967), What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and To Die For (1995), he also co-created (with Mel Brooks) the boomer favorite television series Get Smart. As an actor, Henry appeared in more than 40 films including Candy (1968) for which he also did the screenplay, Catch-22 (1970), Taking Off (1971), The Man Who Fell To Earth (1976), Defending Your Life (1991) and Short Cuts (1995).

Henry had two Academy Award nominations, one for the screenplay for The Graduate and another for directing Heaven Can Wait (1978), for which he also contributed the screenplay. He won anEmmy Award in 1967 for Get Smart. Henry hosted Saturday Night Live 10 times between 1976 and 1980, making him the show’s most frequent host in its first five-years.

My favorite thing about Buck Henry (and I was crazy for him), from 1959 to 1962, he was part of an elaborate hoax: The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals. He made public appearances as ”G. Clifford Prout”, a man with a mission to put clothes on all the millions of naked animals throughout the world. Prout was the founder of the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA). It was never unexplained why his organization was ”for indecency” not ”against indecency”.

Prout first appeared on NBC’s The Today Show in spring 1959. His appearance received a huge viewer response and thousands of letters were sent SINA’s headquarters; Prout had provided a New York City mailing address while on the air.

More interviews followed. Wherever he went, Prout promoted his anti-animal-nudity philosophy and repeated his society’s slogans: “Decency today means morality tomorrow” and “A nude horse is a rude horse.” Prout also urged SINA members (there were over 50,000 of them) to take an active role in their communities by handing ”SINA Summonses” to people who shamelessly walked their naked pets out in the open.

Prout’s campaign continued until August 1962, when SINA was featured on the CBS’s Nightly News With Walter Cronkite. As the segment was airing, a CBS employee recognized that Prout was actually Buck Henry, a CBS employee. SINA was subsequently revealed to be an elaborate hoax. Although Henry played the role of SINA’s president, the hoax had been dreamed up and orchestrated by professional hoaxer Alan Abel, who played SINA’s vice president.

People were either outraged by the idea of SINA, or quite supportive of it. One woman reportedly tried to donate $40,000 to the cause. Abel politely turned down the money, insisting that the bylaws of SINA forbade him from taking any money from strangers. Apparently, Americans were willing to accept anything as real. Thank God those days are behind us.

Abel and Henry managed to keep the joke going for a few more years by means of a SINA newsletter mailed to the faithful. The newsletter featured press releases and sewing patterns for pet clothes.

One of Abel’s earliest pranks was in 1959, when he posed as a golf pro who taught Westinghouse executives how to use ballet positions to improve their game.

Following the Watergate scandal, Abel posed as Deep Throat for a press conference before 150 reporters. At the news conference, this Deep Throat quarreled with his purported wife, then fainted and was whisked away in an ambulance.

Abel wrote, produced, and directed two mockumentaries: Is There Sex After Death? (1971) and The Faking Of The President (1976).

In 1979, Abel staged his own death from a heart attack in Aspen. A fake funeral director collected his belongings and a woman posing as his widow notified The New York Times. The Times published an obituary January 2, 1980. On January 3, 1980, Abel held a news conference to announce that the “reports of my demise have been grossly exaggerated”.

There was also Omar’s School for Beggars, a fictional school for professional panhandlers. As Omar, Abel was invited to appear on television talk shows, including the Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, plus The Morton Downey, Jr. Show, Sally Jessy Raphael and The Mike Douglas Show where Omar ate his lunch on camera. The hoax was a satirical commentary on the rise of unemployment and homelessness in the USA. Omar appeared on television from 1975 to 1988, even though he had been exposed many times.

On The Phil Donahue Show in 1985, soon after the show’s move from Chicago to New York City, seven members of the audience appeared to faint during the broadcast, which was seen live. Donahue feared the fainting was caused by anxiety at being on television. He eventually cleared the studio of audience members and then resumed the show. It turned out the fainting “spell” was another hoax by Abel in what he said was a protest against poor-quality television.

In 1993, when euthanasia and Jack Kevorkian were in the news, Abel set up the bogus company “Euthanasia Cruises, Ltd.”, which would offer cruises allowing suicidal participants to jump into the ocean after three days of partying.

In 1997, Abel launched CGS Productions to promote gift-wrapped pint jars of Jenny McCarthy‘s pee, a parody of McCarthy’s role in a commercial where she appeared sitting on a toilet. The name of the communications director for CGS Productions was Stoidi Puekaw, “wake up idiots” backwards.

In 1998, Abel ran for Congress on a platform that included paying congressmen based on commission; selling ambassadorships to the highest bidder; installing a lie detector in the White House and truth serum in the Senate drinking fountain; requiring all doctors to publish their medical school grade point average in the telephone book after their names; and removing Wednesday to establish a four-day workweek.

Abel appears as ”Bruce the Musician”  in the documentary Private Dicks: Men Exposed (1999), where he claims to be the current holder of the Guinness World Record for the world’s smallest penis. ”Bruce” says that he would only show his shortcomings on camera if the crew were to have group sex afterwards, staying: “They said no. So, I didn’t have to take off my shorts.”

At the 2000 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Abel introduced a campaign to ban all breastfeeding because “it is an incestuous relationship between mother and baby that manifests an oral addiction leading the youngster to smoke, drink and even becoming anti-social.” After 200 interviews, Abel confessed to the hoax.

Abel died in 2018, and Henry (born Henry Zuckerman) checked-out yesterday; no hoax.