He Had a Fever the Night Joan Rivers Came to the Comedy Store.
Then Collapsed on the Stairs After His Set, Waiting for Her.

The Howie Mandel Story

The Person Who Believed In Me  ·  Hosted by David Begnaud

"If not for her saying you were great, if not for her booking me - I wouldn't be sitting here with you right now."

- Howie Mandel, on Joan Rivers

He Hired a Contractor to Expand His School Library, Then Told Nobody.

Howie Mandel traces it to a night in front of the television at four or five years old, watching Candid Camera with his parents. Alan Funt had wired a receptionist's desk to be yanked across the room every time she reached for the phone. Howie didn't yet understand prank or setup or audience. He understood that he was laughing, and that behind him his parents were laughing too, at the same thing, at the same second.

In Toronto, years later, he opened the Yellow Pages to contractors and called one. He said he was inquiring on behalf of his high school: they wanted twenty-five feet added to the west side of the library, and could somebody come measure. He booked the appointment for three o'clock, during math, because that classroom window overlooked the field. And then - this is the part he finds revealing about himself - he told not one other person.

So he sat in math at three o'clock, the only kid in the room looking out the window, watching a man with a clipboard and a tape measure. Then the vice principal walked out to join him. Then the PA: Howard Mandel to the office. His parents were called in, and he remembers them sitting there biting their lips, because they thought it was funny and were trying very hard to be responsible about it.

There was also the swimming pool, a bent Snickers bar thrown in before class, and a hundred kids who gathered to see who had done what they thought had been done. He dove in and retrieved it in his mouth. That one did not make him popular. Three high schools, no diploma, but a reputation. He was four foot ten, his voice hadn't changed, he wasn't an athlete. By his own account he was nothing, and the laugh was the one thing that worked. The OCD, ADHD, depression and anxiety went undiagnosed for another thirty years.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The contractor and the school library - ~6:42

Carson's Booker Didn't Say No. He Said Never.

In the comedy of the late seventies there was one test, and it was Johnny Carson. Tell someone you were a stand-up and the next question was whether you'd been on Johnny; say no and the job title came off you. Howie had done Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas and plenty besides, and it bought him nothing. Jim McCauley, Carson's booker, watched him at the Comedy Store repeatedly and told him flatly he would never be on - Johnny liked monologists, and this was not that.

Then Joan Rivers started guest-hosting, and her ratings came in above Johnny's own. She lived in New York, so the week before each stint she'd fly out and work her monologue at the Comedy Store. Howie called Mitzi Shore, who owned the place, and asked for a very specific favor: the 9:55 slot, the five minutes directly before Joan's ten o'clock, because she'd arrive a few minutes early and would have to watch him. Mitzi gave it to him.

He woke up that morning with a high fever. He lay there all day in a cold sweat trying to get enough strength to drive, and didn't get it, and drove through Laurel Canyon anyway on the theory that you miss every shot you don't take. He could barely stand. Then the lights hit, the adrenaline arrived, and he killed. Joan passed him on the stairs on her way up and said, you are so funny.

So he went and waited on the stairs down to Sunset to ask her about The Tonight Show. The adrenaline drained out of him. He slid down the wall, then sat, then lay down on the steps while she talked to Mitzi for forty-five minutes. When she finally came out she found an idiot lying on the stairs.

The number was one of her managers. The message came back that Joan loved him and wanted him Thursday. He did the show, he killed, and he drove home satisfied that whatever happened next, he could now answer the question - he had been on The Tonight Show. The next morning Jim McCauley called. He had been watching, because everyone watched when Joan was hosting, and he wanted Howie back the following week. He went on to do it twenty-two times with Johnny. Joan kept going after that too: she never once said no when he asked her for something, she showed up to everything he did, and when she had her own late-night show she picked him to fill in for her.

▶ Watch on YouTube: The 9:55 PM spot and the fever - ~26:30

He Disclosed His OCD to Howard Stern. He Thought They'd Gone to Break.

He was diagnosed in his forties, and only because his wife Terry gave him an ultimatum - see a psychiatrist or she was leaving. He had been making the house unlivable. The diagnosis itself was a relief: the thing had a name, OCD, and names come with coping skills. He has Tourette's as well; the sniff is a tic.

Then came the studio. The guests on before him hadn't washed their hands, and when Howie went to leave he couldn't make himself touch the door handle. Someone pulled the tissue away from him. They thought his struggling was funny. He started to have a panic attack, and told Stern straight that he had been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, was medicated, and needed the door opened now. They opened it. He walked into the hallway and heard the conversation still going out over the speakers.

What he thought, immediately, was that it was over - his family shunned, his kids' schoolmates told their dad was a mental case, and no production on earth willing to insure a man who needed medication and therapy. He rode the elevator down and walked out into a teeming New York street hearing his own heartbeat, and the thought he had at the curb was about the traffic. A stranger appeared at his shoulder and asked if he was Howie Mandel, and said he'd just heard him on Stern. Howie's stomach dropped. Then the man whispered: me too.

This was before email. The letters took a week to start and then piled up - people grateful, because with mental health you are certain you're the only one. He is firm that nobody has a little OCD; the word has gone casual, the thing has not. He described a morning in Malibu checking a locked door, checking it again, then punching the knob hard enough to think he'd broken a bone so the pain would prove he'd checked it - then worrying the punch had loosened the lock, and checking again. Half an hour. Asked whether he'd be this successful without it, he didn't hesitate: yes. "I don't think it's a gift. And if it's a gift, I'd like to return it."

▶ Watch on YouTube: The Howard Stern disclosure, and the stranger - ~58:28

He Doesn't Believe in Apologizing for a Joke. He Posted One Anyway.

Someone told him he looked great for seventy and he said he didn't like that - which, in his head, was a bit, the same shape as telling somebody they're very smart for a stupid person. What he read the next day was that he had snapped at Kelly Ripa. So he filmed an apology, and buried a joke inside it that nobody caught. He is clear that he thinks apologizing for a joke is wrong, and equally clear about why he did it: he reads every comment, he has never once not read them, and he was being hit from every direction.

He calls himself inoffendable - hurt often, offended never - and the hurt there wasn't the criticism. It was having tried to be funny and instead made a stranger feel badly used. That fear is why he turns down nearly everything and doesn't eat at other people's houses.

The conviction underneath it is that most people do not have a sense of humor. A joke is not a sense of humor. A sense of humor finds the laugh in the dark - and his evidence is that among his memories of burying his father are some of the deepest laughs of his life. Nothing is off limits and nothing is too soon, so long as you can find it.

He did get to say it to her. He told her he loved her, and that the career wasn't his without her, and he told her daughter Melissa the same. Asked how he wants to be remembered, he declined the question and then answered it anyway, pointing at a photograph of his grandchildren: just remember to call me and say hi, Papa.

▶ Watch on YouTube: Nothing is too soon, and his father's funeral - ~43:00

"I'm Howie Mandel, and the person that believed in me was Joan Rivers."