At the height of his fame as TV’s most mischievous provocateur, Allen Funt was so familiar a figure that when an Eastern Airlines flight he was on in 1969 was hijacked and flown to Cuba, his fellow passengers naturally assumed it was a stunt and that at any moment he would leap from his seat and deliver his famous signature line: “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!”

In fact, the hijacking marked one of the few public moments in which Funt (who, along with his fellow passengers, returned safely home) was not behind the scenes with his hidden camera, ready to expose human behavior in all its bizarre eccentricity. Created by Funt, who died on Sept. 5 at 84 of complications from a 1993 stroke, Candid Camera offered television viewers a rare combination of hilarity and human insight that made it among the top-rated shows of its day.

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Between 1960 and 1967, millions of Sunday night viewers tuned in to the CBS hit to watch the often horrified reactions of unsuspecting passersby duped by Funt’s carefully-choreographed ruses. Among the show’s biggest fans were Muhammad Ali, who approached Funt when the host was stuck in traffic and wangled an invitation to appear on the show, and Marlon Brando, who told Funt he watched regularly as a way of fine-tuning his acting skills. “But Candid Camera was never about stars,” says Funt’s son Peter, 51, who is cohost with Suzanne Somers of the show’s latest incarnation, which launches a new season on CBS Sept. 24 with a tribute planned to his father. “My dad liked to say that the show captures people ‘in the act of being themselves.’ Candid Camera is not dependent on actors or scripts or comedy routines. It’s really as simple as the next person who walks through that door.”

Invariably, that person would be caught unaware, as in one classic episode in which pedestrians backpedaled along a city sidewalk designated a backward zone while a hidden camera captured their incredulity, resignation and eventual compliance. Among Funt’s other ploys: hiring an actor to pose as a guard at the Delaware state line and inform drivers that “Delaware is closed for the day.” Another played a bank teller offering customers counterfeit dollar bills at a discount, and a third, as a movie theater manager, ordered patrons to line up in alphabetical order. Prof. James Maas, 61, who uses Candid Camera episodes in his Psych 101 classes at Cornell University, observes that Funt’s spoofs illustrate such basic human traits as “conformity behavior and group pressure.”

Stepping from behind the scenes at the end of each stunt and greeting sheepish victims with we’re-all-in-this-together camaraderie, Funt guided the show by his own interpretation of the golden rule. “He always cautioned me that we don’t want to do any joke on anyone that we wouldn’t appreciate done to ourselves,” says son Peter, who once posed on the show as a statue in a museum, poking passersby with his spear. “He was never really out to make people look bad. He was eternally grateful for the fact that people were such good sports.” Adds Peter’s brother John Funt, 46, a Connecticut painter: “He thought of himself as someone who studies human nature, particularly the lighter side.”

Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the precocious son of a Russian immigrant diamond cutter and his wife, Allen graduated from Cornell at 19 before landing a job with a New York City ad agency, where he specialized in dreaming up gimmicks for radio programs. In 1947, after service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, Funt launched Candid Camera’s prototype on radio with a hidden-mike program titled Candid Microphone. The show, with a new moniker, was adapted for television the following year.

Funt, twice married and divorced, with five children, in later years raised horses on his 1,100-acre ranch in Big Sur, Calif. There, he continued to write and produce his show for syndication and to manage various spinoff projects, until the stroke incapacitated him. “I once asked my father what he was proudest of,” says Peter. “He said it was to hear people say, ‘Thanks, Allen. You made us smile.’ ”