Donald B. Poynter said one of his best ideas—whiskey-flavored toothpaste—came to him while he was driving his car.

Mr. Poynter was working for an advertising agency in Cincinnati in the early 1950s. Eager to launch his own business, he pitched the toothpaste idea to a former fraternity brother who had become a bank loan officer. The resulting $10,000 loan allowed Mr. Poynter to create a product he sold for the next 17 years.

Donald Poynter's whiskey toothpaste came in three flavors.

Photo: Poynter Family

The toothpaste—it came in bourbon, rye and scotch flavors—launched Mr. Poynter’s career as an inventor and marketer of novelty products, including talking toilet seats, a self-propelled golf ball and a hot-water bottle in the shape of actress Jayne Mansfield.

Mr. Poynter, who died of cancer Aug. 13 at the age of 96, spent four decades dreaming up gimmicks and gizmos for sale at toy stores and gift shops across the U.S. “Every day to my dad was April Fools’ Day,” said one of his sons, Tim Poynter.

One of his biggest hits was the Little Black Box, introduced in the late 1950s. Retailing for $5, it was a box about 3 inches high with an on-off switch. When people turned it on, a small green hand emerged to turn the switch back to off. “It really does nothing,” Mr. Poynter assured the Cincinnati Enquirer. “We figured it as a limited-appeal item in the novelty field, never as a mass-market thing.” It sold in the millions.

The Little Black Box was one of Donald Poynter's bestselling novelty products.

Photo: Poynter Family

The Mad Dog Lighter resembled an ordinary cigarette lighter. When flicked, however, it erupted with a geyser of sudsy foam. At parties, “all of a sudden you’d hear someone screaming,” Tim Poynter said. “You’d know they’d found the lighter.”

The Electric Chair, a realistic miniature, gave unsuspecting guests a shock when they picked it up for a closer look. The Incredible Creeping Golf Ball had two hidden claws that, when discreetly activated, caused it to crawl around the green.

Mr. Poynter’s Poynter Products Inc. also came up with devices that produced wisecracks when people sat down on a toilet or opened a refrigerator door.

Poynter Products typically had annual sales of several million dollars, giving Mr. Poynter the means to raise four children, said Tim Poynter. Though most of the gadgets were made in Asia, there was some assembly in the U.S., and the firm employed as many as about 30 people.

After dreaming up a product, Mr. Poynter had to figure out how it could be manufactured. He made his own molds by hand. When he was creating his toothpaste, he found recipes in a public library and substituted whiskey for water.

Newspapers gave him free publicity by writing about the toothpaste. “Sales were so staggering we were running out of tubes,” he recalled decades later. In 1955, the retail price was $1.50 a tube, or the current equivalent of about $15. “They were putting everything else in toothpaste,” Mr. Poynter told the Akron Beacon Journal, “so I just figured they had overlooked the most obvious thing.”

Donald Byron Poynter, the second of three children, was born May 14, 1925, and grew up in Cincinnati. His father, William Bruce Poynter, was a portrait painter and photographer who invented color-printing techniques. His mother, Gertrude Johnson Poynter, also painted.

Young Don was a drum major in his high-school band and eventually learned to twirl and juggle batons and knives while walking on stilts or riding a unicycle. He also provided voices for radio dramas.

He enrolled at the University of Cincinnati but was drafted into the Army during World War II. Most of his military service was spent at Fort Riley in Kansas, where he was an entertainer whose acts included card tricks and ventriloquism. “I couldn’t have gotten any farther from a battlefield,” he said in a 2018 oral history. “I was very lucky.”

Back at the University of Cincinnati, he served as a drum major and studied business. He once sliced one of his feet to the bone while performing tricks with a knife during a football halftime show but completed his act while bleeding into the turf. The Harlem Globetrotters learned of his skills and hired him as a halftime performer on overseas tours.

Donald Poynter was a baton-twirling performer for the Harlem Globetrotters after graduating from the University of Cincinnati in 1949.

Photo: Poynter Family

After seeing the world with the Globetrotters, he returned to Cincinnati. While at the University of Cincinnati, he had spotted Mona Castellini at a bridge table. She was working on a degree in dietetics. They married in 1952.

By the late 1980s, the disappearance of mom-and-pop stores made it harder for Mr. Poynter to find a market for his novelties. He sold the business to his son Tim, who in turn sold it to another party in the 1990s. Donald Poynter made successful investments developing golf courses. He also invented a device that automatically teed up balls on driving ranges.

His wife, Mona Poynter, died in 2007. Mr. Poynter is survived by four children, 10 grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren.

Turning the tables on a legendary prankster, Tim Poynter said he once stretched clear plastic wrap over a toilet bowl before his father visited the bathroom. “I thought it was funny,” Tim Poynter said. “He didn’t see the humor quite as much as I did.”

In 1988, Don Poynter told the Scripps Howard News Service that he had envisioned a gizmo to be attached to his own tombstone. “When you walked up to it,” he said. “You’d activate an electronic voice. And it would say, ‘Come on down.’ ”

In the end, he resisted that temptation, said one of his daughters, Molly Maundrell. He knew he would be buried next to his wife, and “I think he thought that might be a little disrespectful” to her, their daughter said.

Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com