Mandel makes a ‘Nuisance’ of himself

Something funny is happening on television, but it has more to do with persistence and putting your money where your mouth is than the black-rimmed hidden-camera glasses on Howie Mandel’s nose or the comedian’s penchant for annoying strangers -- however amusing you may find that.

After years of failed pilots and being disappointed by the network development mill, Mandel finally -- and literally -- has his own show. “Hidden Howie: The Private Life of a Public Nuisance” premieres at 11 p.m. Thursday on Bravo, but it’s Mandel’s show through and through. Based on Mandel’s real family -- those poor souls who have no choice but to cope with his odd way of making a living -- “Hidden Howie” is an unscripted comedy that blends his signature hidden-camera bits with events and people from his real life.

Not only did Mandel create and produce the show, he also owns it. In order to get it on the air without network meddling, Mandel acted as his own studio, which essentially left him paying to be on television. The Bravo license fee (less than $1.8 million for all six episodes) didn’t cover all of the production costs, which included many location shoots and salaries for Julie Warner, who plays his wife, guest stars such as Estelle Harris and Marlee Matlin, and the crew, according to Mandel, who wouldn’t disclose how much he spent.

There’s a method to Mandel’s madness.

“The key with any art form, and I believe television is an art form like film and painting, is you have somebody with a vision and you let them go, chances are you may hit,” he said. “The reason I think a lot of television doesn’t hit is you can’t really make something really good or very special by committee or by democracy. Can you imagine if you gave 50 people a paintbrush and you tried to do a painting? How good would the art be?”

Mandel shot the pilot himself over three days, edited the episode at home and worked out a deal with Jeff Gaspin, president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Cross-Network Strategy, to circumvent the pilot process by airing all the episodes on Bravo.

It’s not the only homegrown show making its debut this month. Instead of waiting for their big break, actors Rob McElhenney, Charlie Day and Glenn Howerton used a video camera to film a script they wrote together, spent about $85 in total production costs and sent it to FX. The result was the comedy series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” which began airing on that network this month. Could affordable technology and a little chutzpah be the cure for the sad state of TV comedy these days?

“It’s really rare, but I think it’s going to happen a lot more, because the ability to use the technology that’s available and do it at a price so it’s an airable pilot is at hand right now,” said 3 Arts Entertainment President Michael Rotenberg, co-executive producer of “Hidden Howie” and one of the executive producers of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” “There’s two levels. You can do it the way Howie did it; the pilot he actually shot was good enough to air. Or the way these other guys did it, which was more of a presentation of what the show could be.”

It’s not that television has exactly mistreated Mandel. For six seasons during the 1980s he played the serious and devoted Dr. Wayne Fiscus on NBC’s “St. Elsewhere.” In 1990, Fox premiered Mandel’s animated “Bobby’s World,” which featured the comedian as the 4-year-old central character during its eight-year run.

But Mandel, who will turn 50 in November and has been performing stand-up 200 or more nights a year for the last 25 years, had yet to realize his biggest dream: to create and star in a television show based on his comedy a la Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Tim Allen and Roseanne.

“I was never brave before. I always tried to make it work,” Mandel said. “Now I have nothing to lose except some cash, and it’s just not that important to me. I’ve never been allowed up until now to remain who I am, or true to what my life is like.”

Most people remember Mandel as the curly-haired comic who became an instant hit on the comedy club and television talk-show circuit before “St. Elsewhere.” These days, he’s sporting a shaved head and has the same (very patient) wife, Terry; and he is the father of Jackie, 20, Alex, 15, and Riley, 12. His bread-and-butter is still the stage and his occasional hidden-camera segments on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” and “Live With Regis and Kelly.”

“Howie never got sophisticated, but he got really good at being unbelievably unsophisticated,” said Warner, who plays Mandel’s wife because his real spouse says she cannot act. “Who doesn’t have that part of himself that laughs at silliness? But it’s brilliant silliness because it’s so pure. You get sucked into that world of his.”

That world is one that involves glasses with a hidden camera embedded in them, an uncanny ability to remain straight-faced when asking strangers to perform outrageous acts and a quick wit when an irate victim challenges him. Mandel has been known to require rental-car customers to take “out-of-car” parking tests in which they parallel park their bodies instead of vehicles and use his little girl to serve muffins in the men’s room of a hotel where he was pretending to be a bathroom attendant on “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.”

“When I watch other shows where people do hidden camera, it’s mean and nasty or they’re frightening the people or intimidating them,” said Leno, who asked Mandel to bring his wackiness to “The Tonight Show” five years ago. “Howie doesn’t do that. He very gently makes suggestions and you see that people want to please Howie. I could never do what he does. I’d get halfway through it and tell them it’s a joke.”

“The way he sees the world is different than the way you and I see the world,” Rotenberg said. “So he naturally sees the oddity of it, which you and I may not see. Sometimes it seems silly, but I think the show works because it shows the world how silly all people can be. Howie is just a mirror.”

What Mandel’s TV show reveals is the aftermath of his pranks, and the consequences are often not pretty.

Like the time Mandel decided to take a job at a Halloween costume store for a bit for “The Tonight Show.” When a woman wanting a bird costume walked in, Mandel asked her to go to the back of the store with him, bend over and pull down her underwear. The woman asked Mandel why, and he replied, “Well, I’m going to start gluing feathers directly onto your [rear end].”

Clearly disgusted, the woman asked him if he was Howie Mandel. Who she was -- his daughter’s teacher -- turned out to be more important. The incident prompted Terry Mandel to forbid her husband from doing his shtick within five miles of their Calabasas home. But, as usual, Mandel turned it around.

“Terry was so angry; she kept saying we have to meet with these people at parent-teacher conferences,” Mandel said. “But in the midst of this anger, I realized there’s something funny about the way these pieces affect my life, and I realized there was a show in this, a hybrid where you could see the hidden cameras juxtaposed with this normal domestic life that I lead.”

That was nearly six years ago. Mandel immediately started pitching his show, but nobody wanted it. Then two years ago, with the success of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and other documentary-style reality shows on the air, all the major networks were interested. Mandel picked NBC because of his connection to “The Tonight Show.”

Then the notes started -- and Mandel’s reality/unscripted-comedy hybrid became a traditional four-camera sitcom, taped in front of an audience, which dealt more with how Mandel’s children affect him and less with how his work affects them.

“As an actor, in front of a live audience, I don’t want to hold for a laugh because if you’re having a real conversation, I want it to be real and have that rhythm, because even though I’m re-creating moments, they are things that really happened,” he said. “Silence for me is golden. Silence is awkward and awkward is uncomfortable and uncomfortable is electric and electric is entertaining. My life is filled with awkwardness. I’ve gotten really comfortable in my awkwardness, in my discomfort in being in public, in my discomfort with my shyness. That’s the rhythm. That’s the fabric of who I am and what my comedy is.”

When NBC decided not to pick up the show, nobody was happier than Mandel, who then asked his friends to come to his house over a weekend to tape the pilot the way he envisioned it.

On a hot June weekend in Las Vegas, Mandel stayed cool inside the MGM Grand, the Strip hotel where he has headlined for years, as about 5,000 older women in purple outfits and red hats invaded the hotel lobby and casino.

Riding in buggies, traveling in packs on foot and occasionally displaying a pink hat, the members of the Red Hat Society explained to Mandel that they follow the inspiration of a poem that encourages women to do what they wish as they age. Mandel listened intently, mining the women for that precious kernel that would send him digging for his “designer” glasses. One woman wanted Mandel to visit her treehouse in Hawaii. Another mentioned a field trip to a bordello, which Mandel quickly dismissed: “Germs.” (Mandel admitted to being a lifelong obsessive-compulsive “germophobe” when he was interviewed by Howard Stern a few years ago.)

Then came the break: a pajama party Mandel later attended, pretending to be a hotel security officer who was citing women for their rowdy behavior in their hotel rooms. It was a prank Mandel has probably pulled hundreds of times in hotels across America, a talent he says he developed as a shy child out of boredom.

“If my mom came here today, she’d probably join this red-hat brigade,” Mandel said. “My mother got my sense of humor, even when I was a kid. I would just do things that tickled my fancy in the moment, and she would ask me who I was entertaining. I’d say, ‘Well, me.’ And she would tell me that nobody knew that and they thought I was psychotic. Well, I don’t ever want people to think I’m psychotic, but I can’t help myself from doing these things.”

Later that night he opened his act -- as he always does these days -- with a six-minute video of an elderly man in a yellow polyester suit singing the dullest of songs. As the “Oh Happy Day” droning looped over and over, all audiences react the way this one did, Mandel said. First, they roared with laughter. Then when they realized that the song was not going away, they got downright hostile. It is always Mandel’s favorite part of the night.

“My whole life is a practical joke,” Mandel said. “Every evening and every show has really become about entertaining me. I was always like that. And now I’ve come full circle because that’s what the TV show is too.”

Then amid the crowd’s boos -- they want Howie, not the “Oh Happy Day” dude -- Mandel cracked up: “I think my epitaph is going to go, ‘Thank God, he’s gone.’ ”

*

‘Hidden Howie: The Private Life of a Public Nuisance’

Where: Bravo

When: 11 p.m. Thursday

Ratings: TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14)

Howie Mandel...Himself

Co-executive producers Michael Rotenberg and Howie Mandel.