HOWIE MANDEL’S UNFUNNY BOYISHNESS

The fascination of watching Howie Mandel in action is in seeing how a desperately unfunny man can be deliriously received, as was the case in his appearance before a sellout crowd at the Universal Amphitheatre over the weekend.

With lines like “Last night I slept like a baby. I didn’t really sleep, but I made ca-ca in my bed,� Mandel cozies up to the company founded by the late Andy Kaufman and maintained by Emo Phillips and Pee Wee Herman, among others, who see the world through a playpen and who together define comedy in the ‘80s as an age of infantilism, or at least severe regression. Like Herman, Mandel even has his box of toys to play with in front of us.

Mandel is more of a sociological phenomenon than a cultural artisan who’s hit it big with a special audience (in this case a mostly white, post-pubescent crowd to whom the travails of high school appear lingeringly definitive). In other words, you have to go outside his act to try and figure out the sources of his considerable appeal--there’s nothing in his act to refer to, unless you’re amused by the sight of someone clapping a goopy-looking yellow cap on his head and exclaiming “Don’t you hate it when birds have diarrhea?�

Mandel, who appeared in a raspberry-colored suit and lime green sneakers, wasn’t required to do much except edge along the stage with the characteristic jerkiness of someone suffering severe colonic seizures. He doesn’t have a lot of material (his act lasts about an hour and is sustained a great deal by the nonstop squeals and bellowing and cr1768256288sexually repressed. References to fellatio, for example, and encouraging an overenthusiastic female fan in the audience to yell louder so that he can make her the object of sexually degrading allusions.

He plays the audience some (“What’s your name? Jim? Oh, I took you in school once�), and after he puts a bird cage on his head he does his young Bobby routine in boyish falsetto (“Ooh, he’s so cute� said a young woman sitting behind me), and closes with his by now standard bit of pulling a surgical glove over his head and blowing it up like a huge condom (the allusion isn’t lost on him, as he mentions giving us “safe comedy�).

Afterward, on the way to the parking lot, a young man mentioned Mandel’s prop, a large canvas hand, to his date. “That’s his hand-bag, get it? Heh-heh.� That’s really scraping, but it was a Mandel-style take.

Despite his boyish appeal and energy, Mandel is a dreadful comedian. But he’s hit a nerve in a lot of people (I remember seeing him in The Comedy Store years ago, when he was still startled at how well he was going over with his dumb jokes). Maybe, like so many of the antic jerks clowning their way to comedy success in the ‘80s, he’s teasing out a nostalgic re-enactment of the only innocence anyone can claim anymore--childhood.

Or maybe he’s subconsciously pointing to an underlying despair of young people growing up in a media covered world where a kind of Gresham’s Law has seeped into the culture at large with the contention that the bad drives out the good. Perhaps it’s a perverse idealism that cries, “Long live the bad!� How else can you explain Howie Mandel?