On View : Stream of Howie : SHOWTIME BUILDS A SKETCH SERIES AROUND MANDEL’S RIBALD HUMOR

Gone are the days when Howie Mandel would put a surgical glove over his head and blow it up through his nose.

The stand-up comedian is beyond that. He has broadened his horizons, moved on to a more sophisticated world of sketch comedy in Showtime’s “Howie Mandel’s Sunny Skies.”

So what does he do for openers? Wears a bald-head skin cap and “fat suit” for pregnant women while he dances to the show’s cheesy theme music: Sunny skies are here, sunny skies are here. Let’s get together in style.

“It was something that I had to do, and now that I have gotten it off my chest, I feel better for it,” Mandel deadpans.

“Sunny Skies” is the first time Mandel has taken a stab at his own sketch-comedy series, but rest assured, the new format hasn’t restricted his style. In other words, there are plenty of visual non-sequiturs, regressive humor and potty jokes.

“The show is somewhat cartoonish,” says Mandel, who gained fame as Dr. Wayne Fiscus on “St. Elsewhere.” “It will catch your attention whether it is verbal or audio or visual. There’s always something going on. If you are channel surfing and you catch me dancing, you might just stop it and go, ‘What the hell is this?”’

A few skits: Aliens land on Earth--and communicate by passing gas. A morning talk-show guest shows off a lovable beagle named Tyler. “He is to be destroyed in the morning,” the guest announces to a shocked host. And there’s the woman with a singing breast. (This is cable, after all).

“I remember coming up with that idea and just saying [to the writers], ‘It’s a woman whose breasts sing,’ ” Mandel says. “It was a really quiet room and people were staring at me and I said, ‘Oh, you’ll see.’ I couldn’t even describe it to anyone on my show. . . . Part of my humor is the fact that I love coming out of left field. I don’t want people to expect what is going to happen next.”

Is there anything he won’t do? “He will not vote Republican,” says Rob Cohen, the show’s head writer.

“Sunny Skies” is the the product of a team of six writers, including Cohen, who won an Emmy for the short-lived “Ben Stiller Show,” and an ensemble cast that includes Steven Furst, Tim Bagley, Deborah Theaker and Jennifer Butt. Over the span of 10 weeks, the cast and crew wrote and shot 230 sketches, albeit some are barely a minute in length, for 13 episodes. Often one sketch blends into another, a la “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” or “Laugh-In,” solving the problem of coming up with an ending.

“Rather than spend 12 minutes in one particular sketch or one piece, the longest thing that you see is three minutes,” Mandel says. “It jumps all over the place. If you don’t see something that tickles your fancy, within a minute or two you are on to something else.”

A man hanging out at a bar becomes frustrated as two friends ogle a coffee table topped by a blonde wig. Frustrated that they don’t notice she’s a piece of furniture, he goes to the bathroom, only to find an overzealous attendant who insists on helping him conduct his business.

Many of the more bizarre ideas come from Mandel’s own experiences. Over the years, he’s collected “bags and bags and bags” of napkins, matchbooks and scratch paper, each with scrawled notes about situations he thought were funny.

The bathroom attendant “actually is a real character I bumped into,” Mandel says. “I was in Florida somewhere, on vacation, and there was a bathroom attendant in there, and a kid came in and was just talking. And [the kid] asked ‘Did you ever meet anyone famous?’ And the attendant, he had an Italian accent, said, ‘Yeah, famous people come in here yesterday and he pooped.’ ”

Critics have called Mandel’s humor too gimmicky, slapstick and childish. To Mandel and other writers, it’s a matter of taste.

“There are sketches in [“Sunny Skies”] where I would go, ‘Man, how the hell did this get in there?’ ” Cohen says. “But humor is such a weird-specific people thing.”

Mandel discovered just that in high school, when school administrators found little to laugh at in his pranks. One time, he hired several contracting firms to bid on an addition to the school library--even though there was no such project. The principal was startled to find contractors measuring the library’s walls and writing down specifications. “Next thing I knew I was being called down to the office,” Mandel says. “And there was nothing more thrilling to me than to sit there and seriously explain to the principal that I had gotten three bids; I felt like I was being responsible.”

But the Toronto, Canada, native didn’t long for a comedy career as a teen-ager, when he would watch British comedies such as “Monty Python” and “The Benny Hill Show.” Instead, he went into the carpet business after dropping out of high school. By his early 20s, he had two stores and 24 salesmen.

Only when he went on a business trip to Los Angeles did he take a stab at stand-up. He went to the Comedy Store and tried out a few jokes on amateur night, impressing producer George Foster, who was in the audience. Foster invited Mandel on “Make Me Laugh,” a game show where comics try to make people break up within 60 seconds. Mandel succeeded, and appearances on talk shows followed.

He sold his businesses in Canada and broke the news to his fiance’s parents that he was going to move to California.

“I didn’t convince them,” Mandel says. “I think they’re convinced now. But I don’t think those are the dreams that any parent has of a future son-in-law, to give up a retail business and move to Hollywood where he will get on stage and put a rubber glove on his head.”

Audiences still chant for that routine at concerts, but he won’t do it. It’s not because Mandel feels typecast by the routine. Rather, the last time the latex went on his head, he ruptured a sinus.

“Doctor’s orders,” he says in a serious tone. “I have to be the only person in America who had a doctor say to him, ‘Please don’t put any more surgical gloves on your head and inflate them. That was the end.’ ”

“Howie Mandel’s Sunny Skies” airs Fridays at 11:30 p.m. on Showtime.