'Hidden Howie' should stay out of sight

''People who annoy people are the luckiest people in the world," Howie Mandel says in the opening credits of his new Bravo sitcom. Which makes Howie Mandel a very lucky person indeed.

With ''Hidden Howie: The Private Life of a Public Nuisance," which premieres tonight at 11, Mandel wins the annoying lottery. He aces the annoying exam. He takes home the Oscar, the Emmy, the Tony, and the Grammy for most annoying. And in the country of Annoying, he is the eternal king.

For one thing, his show has too obviously been lifted from Larry David's ''Curb Your Enthusiasm." Mandel is annoyingly imitative. Like David, he plays a version of himself, with a wife (played by actress Julie Warner) who tolerates his neuroses and his habit of offending strangers. The show copies the improvised feel of ''Curb," and it, too, is set in Hollywood, where Mandel has encounters with the likes of Jay Leno.

Also, Mandel's acting is annoying, and for all the wrong reasons. He's not organically annoying, like David; he's straining to be annoying, as he brags about having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and makes a big deal about his fixation on protecting himself from germs. He's almost smug about how annoying he is. Which makes him doubly annoying.

The plots are flimsy -- he fears his teen son is going to be gay because he has pink pajamas, for example. And he won't let his grandmother's friend drink from the mugs in his home because she has a cold sore on her lip. Only a master such as David can make this kind of pettiness into something operatic. In Mandel's hands, it's all as slight and forced as it sounds. It's paltry, annoyingly so.

Also annoying: The ''Curb Your Enthusiasm" motif of ''Hidden Howie" is intercut with the candid-camera bits that Mandel makes for Leno's ''Tonight Show." We see Mandel film them, and later try to sell them to Leno for possible airing.

Mandel appears to believe there's something vaguely original about these reality sequences in which unsuspecting strangers around the city encounter him being oh-so-bizarre. Wearing a pair of glasses that's also a hidden camera, Mandel tells a store clerk he wants to mummify his grandmother, for instance, or that he wants to buy a toy to make his son gay. Naturally, the clerks respond with polite dismay.

And viewers will probably also respond with some dismay, along with boredom. The show is a dud, as annoying as a TV review that uses the word annoying more than a dozen times.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.