Great bit! Had not seen this before and had not remembered how funny how we was in this stage of his career! As a side note, No lie, that contortionist woman was beautiful 🙂
Was just thinking the same thing. Only thing I can think of is, mental illness often does progress in time. Also, there have been quite a few times where he blatantly, for lack of a better term, violates himself and his disorder, for the sake of laughs.
Jamal Nasheed Abdul El he has a great interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast that was released this week. He talks about having to put up with it and the vigorous things he’ll do after tapings to feel clean again. It’s interesting he was trying to make it so he’d have to perform while dealing with his disorder.
It's because back then, he kept his OCD to himself so no one knew about it and he didn't want to tell them. He said in a recent interview that he used to scald his hands for at least an hour after.
@John Brown Howie has severe OCD and he is germaphobe(fear of germs), he don't shake hands for many years already, he probably doesn't feel good here for shaking hand but he still did it, maybe trying to overcome fear.
I often wonder if the nervous and naive comics, among others, that show up on AGT have any idea of the true talent and manic energy that was Howie Mandel early on. And, if so, do these people realize they have virtually no shot at developing into the super star that Mandel is or that they want to be? For the most part, you cannot create this sort of energy or teach this creativity.
I wished I knew this Howie first. Binged Got Talent for more than 8 years, I'm just seeing this Man was, it's so strange from what I have seen while watching GT. Very very strange
In his early career, he would shake hands. His COD got much worse. He had a talk show where he had to shake his guest's hands and during the commercial breaks, he would put a shit load of germ x on his hands. He didn't tell the public he was a germaphobe until like the late 90`s and early 2000`s, so he had to hide it and forced to shake people's hands.
Cause people know what real comedy is unless you have an IQ less then 35 or the most vanilla person on the planet that can only relate to "comedy" on a kindergarten level and most of them can't relate and are way above that garbage level of "comedy "
Back then, he'd told no one about his issues and struggles and he didn't want to because he felt awkward about it all. He said in a recent interview that before he did the fist bump when no one knew about his OCD, he would shake hands and then scald his hands for at the least of an hour.
Did you see him afterwards? At the end? He is breathing heavy and not able to put his hand in his pocket after. Wasn’t even a full shake. It’s situations like that that got him to change his behavior and not do it anymore. It’s life lessons. It was a social norm thing to shake hands, only reason why he did it.
