Twenty years before Sacha Baron Cohen was even born, a hoaxer was taking the brave new world of 1950s mass media by storm. You might call him the grandfather of Borat. Alan Abel, who has barnstormed the world of network news, TV talk shows, and headline-hungry newspapers for half a century, is the original entertainment trickster.

Shortly after his graduation from college in 1950, Mr. Abel’s first hoax began innocently enough as a far-fetched piece of satire that was misinterpreted by the Saturday Evening Post. Targeting the perception of social decency and the rise of unchecked censorship, Mr. Abel drafted a story that imagined American values taken to their logical extreme, in the form of an absurd organization: the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (SINA), whose mission was to clothe naked animals around the world. After receiving a reply from the Post, which high-mindedly decried the idea, Mr. Abel found himself perplexed and inspired.

It said far more about the uptight, buttoned-down state of things, he thought, that not only was his satire not appreciated — it was viewed with the utmost credulity.

Thus a hoaxer was born. Mr. Abel soon launched nationwide campaigns advocating the prohibition of breast-feeding and privatizing public bathrooms. He trumpeted the debut of the KKK Symphony Orchestra (to be guest conducted by David Duke), and advertised tickets for a euthanasia cruise line, offering guests the chance to “sail away to heaven.”

Mr. Abel’s brazen and bizarre career is the focus of a series this weekend at Anthology Film Archives, “Confessions of a Hoaxer: The World of Alan Abel.” Headlined by the new documentary “Abel Raises Cain,” directed by Mr. Abel’s daughter, Jenny, the series also features two remarkable films crafted by Mr. Abel: the 1971 mockumentary “Is There Sex After Death?” and the subversive and fascinating 1976 spoof “The Faking of the President.” Mr. Abel famously promoted the latter by holding a press conference, at which he, impersonating an audio expert, was to reveal the reconstructed missing 18 minutes from the Watergate tapes. With the assembled press hushed in anticipation, Mr. Abel expressed dismay as he pressed play and heard nothing but silence. Someone had erased his 18-minute reconstruction, he assured the gathered crowd. Later, he hired an actor to pose as Deep Throat for a press conference in New York City before 150 reporters. At the news conference, the impostor quarreled with his purported wife, then fainted and was taken away in an ambulance.

The Anthology series balances Mr. Abel’s sensational antics and his more crafted works of cinema, reflecting the two sides of a man who is equally at ease going for the easy, awkward laugh and creating more sophisticated political spoofs à la Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

“But I never went into great depth, thinking about why I was doing what I was doing, and what social significance it had,” Mr. Abel said in advance of this weekend’s four-day event. “Clearly, there were times when I was trying to make a point, but I never felt like a sociologist tapping into the world’s psyche. I was just having fun and enjoying the opportunity to perform.”

Mr. Abel’s “performances” often took the form of a stern-looking, quick-speaking talking head on the evening news, vigorously announcing his support for any number of insane ideas and fake organizations. He once appeared in bandages as Howard Hughes, announcing to the world that he was about to be cryogenically frozen, resigned to return to the world only when the stock market was in better shape. And he proved popular as Omar, the founder of “Omar’s School for Beggars,” a fictional panhandling school that various news outlets saw fit to feature in their “odd news” segments at the close of the broadcast.

If there’s a constant to Mr. Abel’s work, it has been the exposure of the media’s ravenous appetite for content. His sensational stories normally find airtime without the burden of fact-checking, and the preposterous characters he “played” on television were usually accepted without question because it helped ratings.

Still, anyone who’s had as many obituaries retracted as Mr. Abel is clearly doing it for fun. It’s that spirit of rabble-rousing, the excitement of duping the suits behind the news desk, that will take center stage tonight and Friday with the life-spanning documentary “Abel Raises Cain” as well as “Alan Abel: Professional Media Prankster,” a collection of pranks and raw footage that surveys Mr. Abel’s half-century of hell-raising.

What might surprise audiences, though, is Mr. Abel’s more artistic side, as seen in his pranks intended for the movie theater. Scheduled for Saturday evening, “Is There Sex After Death?” pokes fun at the notion of the sexual revolution, as well as the reactionary response it incited. Particularly noteworthy is a climactic depiction of a “Sex Olympics,” where couples compete in a number of time trials before a business-formal crowd. “The Faking of the President,” to be shown Sunday, so effectively manipulates the sounds and images of President Nixon, twisting the man into an outrageous, boorish cretin, that conservative audiences at the film’s premiere in Salt Lake City destroyed the theater and sent Mr. Abel running out of town — on the sheriff’s advice.

While Mr. Abel said he and his wife Jeanne (both will be appearing in person throughout the weekend) are fans of Mr. Cohen’s “Borat,” the success of that movie helped him to realize that he has decades’ worth of unfinished material sitting in a box — funnier, he says, than anything on display in the 2006 blockbuster. “I’m currently protesting the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded terror alerts,” he said judiciously. “They don’t realize there are 2.5 million color-blind people who won’t be aware that we’re about to be attacked. I’m also proposing we abolish the income tax law. We want to substitute a tax instead by body weight. Obesity’s a big probem in our country, and if we had the entire family weigh in on April 15 and if we charged $5 per pound for Uncle Sam, I promise you this would be a country of thinner people.”

Do you honestly expect someone to believe that?

“Oh, you’ll see this printed somewhere real soon — I promise you.”

ssnyder@nysun.com