Yes, the "Don Novello" who appears to have qualified for the California gubernatorial ballot is the same Don Novello who portrayed (and may still portray, for all I know) the eminent Father Guido Sarducci. For those of you who can't place the name, Father Sarducci was the gossip columnist and rock critic for the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, and occasional Assistant Managing Editor of the Vatican Inquirer. Novello wrote on and off for Saturday Night Live for years (he is often credited with the "cheeseburger, cheeseburger" sketches, among others) and sometimes appeared on the show, or on other programs as Sarducci.
In yet another identity, he was Laszlo Toth, author of a brilliant book entitled The Lazlo Letters, which actually defies description but I'll try: Novello made up a character named Lazlo Toth, named after Laszlo Toth (note the different spelling), the latter being the man who took a hammer to Michelangelo's Pieta. What Novello's Toth wrote was almost as destructive. He penned very strange letters to an array of prominent individuals, received an amazing array of replies, and then published both in The Lazlo Letters, which was subtitled, "The Amazing, Real-Life, Actual Correspondence of Lazlo Toth, American." Could all three of these men, rolled into one, be the next governor of California? Probably not…but the actual result won't be any less bizarre.