Howie Mandel at the Howie Mandel Comedy Club

Howie Mandel takes a break from his comfortable role as a clean-cut television judge to remind people he started as a high-strung club comic. He is less concerned with clean, family-friendly humor here, opting instead to sweat through a set that touches on his well-documented germaphobia, confusing underwear choices, and unexpected medical anomalies. The humor is physical and neurotic, relying on his frantic energy to carry stories that lean further into vulgarity than his network television fans might expect. Filmed at his self-named comedy club inside the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the 2019 release was Mandel’s first stand-up special in over twenty years. By this point, he was firmly established as a primetime television fixture on America’s Got Talent. Rather than playing to the safe, broad demographic of his day jobs, he uses the club setting to tell prolonged stories about finding a gerbil in an unusual place and his inability to understand women’s undergarments.