OurStage

Long before Borat hauled his mustachioed mischief across the Western Hemisphere, Alan Abel was giving interviews in the guise of ridiculous characters and whipping the world into an outraged lather. Abel uses the media to lampoon the media—he is, technically speaking, a culture jammer, though he isn't pretentious enough to describe himself that way.

In his eyes, he's just an old-fashioned hoaxer who gets a kick out of watching people make much ado about nothing. Abel's mock-moral crusade "Citizens Against Breastfeeding" stirred controversy in the late 1990s, just as his "Society for Indecency to Naked Animals" had in the 1960s. Both groups made asinine calls for morality in America, and while both were complete jokes, for long stretches the only one in on the jokes was Abel himself and whomever he had brought along for the ride.

From time to time, that "whomever" was his daughter, Jenny. ABEL RAISES CAIN is Jenny's film, and it is as much a biography of her father as it is an exploration of her family life. What was it like to be raised by a man who always had a trick up his sleeve, and whose tricks always brought the media vultures swirling? Jenny was ostensibly in on the jokes, but, as we see in this oddly poignant film, it was never easy being raised by the one throwing the punch lines.