Howie Mandel Talks 'America’s Got Talent,' Nene Royal, 'Gremlins' & More I The Rich Eisen Show

Howie Mandel has judged America's Got Talent for 16 years. He is, by his own accounting, the oldest and longest running judge on the panel.

He has never seen anything like this year.

"I have never in the history of my tenure seen anything that is more viral, more electric, more exciting," he told Bobby Bones, who was filling in for Rich.

The name is Nene Royale, and Mandel spent a good portion of the interview insisting he was not promoting anything.

"I'm professing."

She is 16, from Thailand, and got her guitar at seven. In the auditions she walked out shy in a party dress, quiet, holding the instrument. Then she hit the first chord and screamed.

"It was the most amazing, surprising, wonderful thing," Mandel said. Nobody in the room understood yet how completely it would take.

The evidence he offered is not television evidence. It is street evidence. Times Square lit up. Driving to work on the 101, Mandel passed people flying flags out of car windows supporting her. When the callback episode hit YouTube, he says it drew something like 47 million clicks in the first hour.

Asked to place her historically, Mandel reached for the one name the format has produced globally, across America's Got Talent, Britain's Got Talent, Thailand's Got Talent, all of it.

Susan Boyle.

"This is twice Susan Boyle," he said, and then drew the distinction he clearly cares about, which is between a moment and a career. Everyone knows Susan Boyle. Mandel is not sure everyone was buying a ticket.

The season changed format this year, adding judge callbacks, where the panel narrows roughly 150 approved acts down to 44. Simon Cowell suggested that any judge who truly believed in someone should take five or six acts home.

Mandel took his to his own offices, where he records his podcast and where a live band works, then put them onstage at the Laugh Factory in front of an audience so they could get real notes.

Nene Royale played that room in front of Mandel and Nikki Glaser and, in his telling, blew the roof off.

"Every time we see her, it's that much better."

The larger question Bones kept circling was how a man does 16 years of this without going numb, and Mandel had clearly answered it before.

"You think you've seen everything and you feel a little jaded, and then you realize you ain't seen nothing yet."

His explanation for why is structural, and it is the best answer in the interview. America's Got Talent has no barrier to entry.

They have had performers near 100 years old do something nobody has seen from someone that age. They have had two-year-olds do the same. Age, gender, culture, borders, none of it filters anything out.

"It's not like any other show on TV. It's for absolutely everybody and everything."

He also thinks each year manufactures the next one. Somebody watches an act and thinks they can do that, except they can hang upside down while doing it, or do it with 100 people.

His own golden buzzer this year was a magic act called Hundred Fingers, and the backstory proves his point. The performer reached the semifinals around 2017 and got told by Cowell that a show this size needed something bigger. He came back with ten friends and turned it into a dance troupe that does magic mid-movement, things appearing and disappearing and flying while the whole thing is in motion.

There is also a one-legged parkour athlete, and an aerialist Mandel described as doing something he has genuinely never seen after watching what he estimated, then immediately walked back, as a million aerialists.

His definition of talent is broader than the title suggests.

"Talent isn't singing and dancing," he said. "Talent is a way of engaging other people that you don't know in kind of a unique original way." Humans are all unique, so the show gets things nobody would classify as traditional talent.

He offered a case study. Years ago, when Howard Stern was judging, a man performed under the name Horse whose act consisted of absorbing impacts to the groin, including jumping off a ladder onto a two-by-four. You might ask what the talent is. He got six episodes out of MTV, before Jackass, and made a career.

Mandel is also clear that this is a talent show rather than an amateur show, and compared it to the US Open. Michael Winslow, the sound effects man from Police Academy, competed.

What moves him is the other category entirely, the people whose lives got in the way. Illness, or raising a family, and a lifetime of always having wanted to sing or clog dance.

"I love just being there and watching somebody who just has an inkling of an idea or a little hope, and their life changes forever."

The rest of the hour was Mandel being Mandel, which mostly meant refusing every premise offered to him.

He objected to the germaphobe briefing the staff had received, on the grounds that nobody told anyone not to touch him, and reported that his urologist once mentioned everyone says the same thing, so Mandel is not confident he has ever truly been examined.

He explained his vision, which is genuinely limited. His right eye has 8 percent vision and never worked, and he is severely colorblind, which is why he could not locate a large red foam finger Bones was pointing at.

Which is also why he does not drive himself. His wife is comfortable with a self-driving Tesla, because Mandel crashes cars, does not focus, and once took flying lessons that ended midair when the instructor told him to stop.

He loves the Waymos too, though he has been asked to stop taking them, after discovering the in-car service button and using it to report a boo-boo.

"They did Waymo than I wanted them to do."

He was informed the room was standing up for that one. He noted he had not been saving it.

On aging, he declined the compliment about looking good at 70 with an argument that is hard to refute. Saying someone looks good for their age only means they are not dead. It is like telling someone they are smart for a stupid person.

"If I told you I was 35, I wouldn't get that same compliment."

Stand-up remains the center of it. He tours constantly, and when he is home he is at the Laugh Factory, the Improv or the Comedy Store on his nights off, working out material alongside Sebastian Maniscalco, Jay Leno, Arsenio Hall and Dave Chappelle dropping in.

Bones asked why the great Howie Mandel needs to practice.

Because sometimes a bit feels funny on the inside and comes out otherwise, and he will not do that to someone who paid for a ticket.

"Like I thought I'd be a great pilot," he said. "I wasn't."

The last real question was TJ's, and it was about Gremlins.

Mandel is Gizmo. He never read a script, because the movie was already finished. He auditioned for the sound, then watched the character on screen and put the voice into his mouth.

He was asked, in the final ten seconds, how he felt reading the script for Braveheart.