Mo Mandel Talks Booze, Nesting Dolls and His New Show Barmageddon
Comedian Mo Mandel’s new series Barmageddon premiered recently on TruTV. On the show, bar owners swap establishments and compete to see who is the better manager. The series premiere takes place in New York, and pits bar owners against each other to discover who can run the more lucrative business model.
In the premiere, two New York bars faced off: an old school, local Queens establishment, ‘The Attic,’ v. a male Go-Go bar in Hell’s Kitchen, ‘The Fairy Tail Lounge.’ Big personalities collide and compromise during a night where hangovers are caused by more than alchohol.
You’ll recognize the show’s host/stand-up comedian Mo Mandel from Chelsea Lately,Conan, Craig Ferguson, and probably your local bar. Paste caught up with the charming comedian to talk about the show, bars, and all things libations related.
Paste: So, tell me a bit about the show.
Mo Mandel: It’s whacky. To me, it’s just like pure entertainment, crazy, hilarious fun TV. Just a chance to take your mind off all the depressing things in the world and just watch this sort of carnival go down.
Paste: I was curious as to how the idea came about, and how’d you get involved?
MM: The idea was actually developed by Jeff Gaspin who was the former president of NBC. I’m not sure how he came up with it. The way I got involved was they saw me on Chelsea Lately, a show I used to do a lot, and it was one of those lucky breaks where the right person sees you when the right project is around. We shot a pilot in Baltimore in January, and apparently it was one of the higher testing pilots they had at TruTV. People just flipped over it, and so they ordered eight more episodes and I spent the majority of the fall drinking in bars around the country.
Paste: You poor thing.
MM: My brother is a lawyer, and we’d be on the phone everyday, and he’d go over what he did, and I’d be like, I had 17 drinks and I interviewed a drunk bartender, and he’d be like, “God I hate you so much.”
Paste: What kind of cities did you go to, and was there one that stuck out as having the most interesting bar culture?
MM: We shot in Baltimore, New York, Southern Florida, and Chicago. Chicago was a city I had never really been before. I performed stand up comedy in most cities in America. For some reason, downtown Chicago, I’d just never been, and it’s now my favorite city. It’s awesome. There’s a huge bar culture. People are all about going out there. Great restaurants. It was really the only job that college actually prepared me for: Whiskey in my bloodstream? I remember that lesson.