Howie Mandel

Three separate careers sit on this page and none of them explains the others. Mandel came out of stand-up and has spent four decades refusing to settle into one job.

The first career is St. Elsewhere, where he played Dr. Wayne Fiscus inside a hospital drama that took itself extremely seriously. Casting a comic in it was a gamble, and it worked because Fiscus is written as somebody using jokes to stay upright, which is a different thing from comic relief.

The second is Gizmo. Mandel voiced him in Gremlins and again in the 1990 sequel, and that sound is the reason a puppet reads as something you would protect rather than something you would poke. He built an animation career on the same instrument: Bobby and Howard in Bobby's World, which he created and starred in, Baby Animal and Baby Bunsen in Muppet Babies, the Sandman in Hansel & Gretel, Spencer in Pinocchio 3000.

The third is hosting, and it is the one that made him a fixture: Deal or No Deal, then the judging chair on America's Got Talent since 2010 and Canada's Got Talent since 2022. Neither Deal or No Deal nor the Canadian series is among the credits gathered here.

The film work in between forms a strange shelf: Maurice in Little Monsters, Dennis Powell in A Fine Mess, Charlie in Harrison Bergeron, a duke in the mock documentary 7 Days in Hell, himself in Killing Hasselhoff. He is a better actor than the game show chair suggests and has rarely been asked to prove it.