Howie Mandel wrote his new book, Here’s the Deal: Don’t Touch Me, while recovering from a serious heart condition, which required “internal defibrillation.”
It was a scary time, and Mandel’s grim fears are a constant theme throughout the book. It’s unnerving, because Mandel has always been the most boyish of performers.
His brush with mortality seems so different from the devil-may-care lad we thought we knew.
The other health issue in the book is Mandel’s OCD. He takes us on a tour of his horror of human contact, which he’s often played for laughs, but not here.
Clearly, the OCD is a constant concern, and always has been. During his Yuk Yuk’s years in Toronto, he must have been suffering in silence every time we hugged him or high-fived. He said nothing, and we never knew. Of course, in these days of H1N1, Mandel looks like a bit of a seer.
The book has a co-author, but it feels like Mandel’s voice. He takes us on a tour of his charmed life, and the best parts may be his reminiscences of life in middle class suburban Toronto.
His was a happy childhood, with a family that loved him, trips to Florida, a childhood sweetheart that he married, nothing that would indicate the blessed maniac he would become. He went to work at a carpet store, but his heart wasn’t in that; the irrepressible prankster was emerging.
He would hold client meetings in the men’s room of the carpet store, waiting for the customer to question it. They never did! “Why don’t you get on amateur night?” his friends pleaded. He did, and the rest is history.
I don’t remember Mandel’s first performance, but I do remember that quickly afterwards he became the best performer on open mike night and was quickly promoted.
He got his first feature in under a year, something of a record. There’s a great picture in the book of a manic Mandel in front of the Yuk’s marquee that reads “Howie Mandel — A Borderline Psychotic.” He looks so proud.
And on he goes to California, to bigger and bigger rooms and to becoming a household name by the mid-’80s.
But the book finally tells the stories that are the purest Mandel: the pranks, hoaxes and practical jokes. Most of these pranks were played upon a hapless innocent named Lou Dinos, who was Mandel’s opening act.
These stories have circulated for years, and Mandel finally tells them: Dinos is made to wear a dress on tour to take advantage of family rates on planes; Dinos’s fake paternity of a 13-year-old boy and more. Howie acknowledges that these stunts took advantage of his trusting friend, and he apologizes publicly for them.
But the pranks may, in fact, be Mandel’s finest work, so elaborately calibrated that had they been documented at the time they would not have been out of place as an exhibit of performance art. There are also great anecdotes about his public pranking on TV shows such as the Tonight Show and Regis and Kathy Lee. There are lots of laughs in this book and a surprising amount of heart. Reading it, you may find there’s more to Howie Mandel than you thought.
