The Mandel family didn’t know what their son Howie was going to do for a living. Frankly, successful actor/comedian was not even on the list.
Howie was a special child. He was — to put it delicately — annoying. And he still is.
“Some things never change,” he said in a telephone interview. “I did all the things that [made people say], ‘Well, he’ll grow out of it,’ and now it’s a career. Everything I was punished for and expelled for is now my career.”
Every aspect of Mandel’s multifaceted personality is on full display in his new short-run series, “Hidden Howie: Public Life of a Private Nuisance” on Bravo, Thursday nights at 11 p.m., starting Aug. 18. And as he notes in the show’s intro, “People who annoy people are the luckiest people in the world.”
He’s referring to the portion of the program where he uses a camera hidden in his glasses to pull “Candid Camera”-style tricks on unsuspecting people. Fans of “The Tonight Show” and “Regis and Kelly,” where these shorts regularly appear, are already familiar with the lengths Mandel will go to for a laugh.
For example, on the premiere episode of “Hidden Howie,” he goes into a crafts store looking for something he can use to preserve his recently deceased grandmother. Needless to say, he wants to mummify her “before she rots.”
The helpful clerk — not an actress, but a real clerk — is so polite she doesn’t blink as she suggests the proper type of tape and its appropriate quantity for a 5-foot-1, 130-pound woman.
While viewers will get more than a few laughs from these segments, not everyone is pleased. Some establishments have taken out restraining orders on him. He says he’s legally forbidden from mentioning their names, but admits there’s a zoo — “I won’t mention the city”—where he is permanently banned. His wife had to take their children without him.
The show is loosely based on Mandel’s life and his mishugas, including his obsessive-compulsive disorder, which consists of germ phobia and the inability to shake hands with strangers. This has been a particular problem on the road, as Mandel performs 200 to 300 dates a year. He’s even carried a black light to spot germs in hotel rooms. “Going to the bathroom was like a scene from the Cirque du Soleil,” he said.
Mandel is obviously Jewish on “Hidden Howie,” and in the premiere episode, which is modeled after one of Mandel’s real-life Holocaust benefit shows, a rabbi gives a long speech about the Holocaust and death before introducing the comedian. Needless to say, said Mandel, that became “a tough room, because there’s no segue from the Holocaust to comedy.”
Something else happened that evening, however, that didn’t make the premier. Mandel’s assistant, Ritchie, a non-Jew, ran backstage and informed Mandel that, apparently, there was a last-minute opening act. That’s kind of a show biz no-no. The headliner is supposed to know who will be on before him.
Worse, still, according to Ritchie, “It [wasn’t] a good act. [It was] Just an old man singing and cutting bread.”
As Mandel explains it, “it was a very old Jewish Gallagher.”
That Mandel, 49, is in show business at all is an accident of fate. He didn’t step on a stage until he was in his early 20s. “Growing up in a middle class Jewish family in Toronto, I was so far from show business, so far from comedy.”
He was asked to leave three different high schools, and never graduated. But with help from his family, he got into the retail carpet business. He became relatively successful, and when the time came to pick up a line of novelty items from a Los Angeles-based company, he decided to combine business and pleasure and visit Tinseltown.
He stayed in a hotel near the Comedy Store and decided to try his luck on stage during Monday evening’s amateur night open-mic. He thought, “what a great opportunity to make a fool of myself 3,000 miles from home.” In Lana Turner fashion, he was spotted by a talent scout and given an audition for a TV show called “Make Me Laugh.”
From there, came appearances on Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and a call from Diana Ross, who wanted Mandel to open for her.
“I was engaged to be married at the time,” explained Mandel, “and I said to my fiancé, this is an opportunity. If things don’t work out I can always sell. And one thing led to another and now I have an article in a Jewish publication. This is a dream come true.”
While he often kids about it, Mandel takes his faith seriously. He does over 200 concerts a year. “When my father passed away and I said Kaddish, it was in my contract that they couldn’t start the show before sundown and they had to find me a minyan. That doesn’t sound like much, except if you [were] doing a show in Iowa, [that meant finding] six strangers and four trees.” In Oklahoma, he claims he found his minyan at a funeral.
He’s passed his beliefs on to his children. “What I love about being a Jew is the belief in a power greater than us and that there is only one.” He speaks also about the responsibility of Jews “to make a difference in the world, and not just to get a plaque and giving tzedakah without telling anyone.”
He told his kids that their b’nai mitzvah were “not about getting envelopes and were not about theme parties. [I told them] now, if you go out in the world and do something bad, I can’t say, ‘Oh, [you’re] just a kid.'”