Mal Sharpe, Groundbreaker in Street-Level Pranking, Dies at 83

Mr. Sharpe enrolled in Boston University’s public relations and communication program, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1958. He later pursued a master’s degree in broadcast communications at Michigan State University. His interest in jazz led him to San Francisco, drawn, he said, by an image on the cover of an album by the San Francisco jazz musician Turk Murphy.

He and Mr. Coyle, who died in 1993, called their pranks “terrorizations,” but generally the pranksters and their targets parted as friends thanks to Mr. Sharpe’s genial personality.

Well, except for that time the two got arrested.

“We were interviewing this guy and told him that we wanted to borrow his car for a few hours to go to a restaurant,” Mr. Sharpe related to The New York Times in 2000. “He said, ‘How do I know you’re going to bring it back?’ We said that would be the great thing for him: We would bring it back and then he’d have more trust in human beings. And he called the police.”

The two made a television pilot, but nothing came of it, and in the mid-1960s Mr. Coyle abandoned the partnership. Mr. Sharpe, though, kept doing on-the-street interviews, working in radio and advertising and releasing two albums on his own. In the early 1970s he had a nationally syndicated television show, “Street People.” He worked for several radio stations doing street interviews, and for years he was a host of “Back on Basin Street,” a jazz program on KCSM in the Bay Area. He also had his own jazz band, Big Money in Jazz.

In 1964 Mr. Sharpe married Sandra Lee Wemple; in addition to his daughter, his wife survives him.

The Coyle and Sharpe radio show lasted only two years. Although Mr. Sharpe did plenty of pranking on his own afterward, he told San Francisco Weekly in 1995 that his partnership with Mr. Coyle was in a class by itself.

“You hate to think your best stuff was the first stuff you did, but in a way I’ve always felt that way,” he said. “That stuff was much more artistic, and had more validity and somehow was out there on a level that I really didn’t do again in many ways.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/arts/mal-sharpe-dead.html