Bob Saget, a Dirty Dad: Appreciate the Darker Elements of the Talented Comedian’s Work

If all you’ve ever seen Bob saget are clips from his performance as Danny Tanner on ABC sitcom “Full House” you can think of him as a mere entertainer. Even when he’s recommending a clip of some poor bastard getting spanked in the groin as the host of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” his wisecracks It is still rated as a decision G. For more than a decade in the late 1980s and 1990s, he provided incredibly healthy and safe laughter for the entire family.

Saget died suddenly on Sunday from unknown causes, and the overflowing grief from his former co-stars and other comedians suggests that the late Jewish comedian certainly was, in his words. “How I meet your Mother” co-star Josh Radnor, a “mensch among mensches.” Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, his “Full House” co-stars, called him “the most loving, kind, and generous man.”

However, there’s more to his comedic personality than just his family-friendly TV jokes. In his stance, Saget is completely defamatory, to use a term his easygoing “Full House” character might have used. He’s a lot like Buddy Hackett, who can charm his way through a children’s movie and sing “Shipoopi,” then make a sailor blush with his stage performance. To truly understand Saget’s talent, you have to appreciate the dark elements in his work.

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Comedy, like charity, often begins at home, and in Saget’s childhood home, comedy is often uncensored. His father, Ben, a supermarket executive, is a fan of dirty jokes, which he is not afraid to share with his young son.

“A&P and Stop and Shop are merging,” says elder Saget, setting up his seemingly innocent Dad Joke in fact begging for a teen catchphrase: “They’re calling the new store. is Stop and Pee.”

The raw humor helped Ben deal with the aftermath of a difficult life, in which he lost two newborn children to dysentery and three of his five siblings suffered a heart attack prematurely, then later He had two heart attacks.

“My family has seen so much death and drama over the years,” Saget wrote in her memoir, “just like we were always waiting for the next tragedy to come.”

Their answer to all that tragedy was comedy, which Saget accepted at a very young age. During his high school years, when the family lived in Los Angeles. Saget will ask his mother to drive him to a local nursing home so he can spend time with one of his first comedic heroes, Larry Fine of the Three Stooges. He’ll listen to Fine’s endless stories about the broken rib and broken nose he suffered while performing the move.

Ben’s job eventually brought the family back to Philadelphia, where Saget was born. After graduating from high school, he thought he had to do what any good Jewish boy does: go to college and become a doctor. However, his English teacher pulled him aside and demanded that he become a performer.

“You need to make people laugh,” she told him. Saget obeyed, enrolling at Temple University to study film.

He started standing up all over Philadelphia while still a college student. Taking the opportunity, Saget will take a train to New York to do a short set at the up-and-coming star catch-and-improvement competition. His original material is clean, but unusual. He will go on stage to perform “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” with a water bottle hidden behind his guitar so he can make the guitar start to “cry” as he plays it. The laughter of the crowd made his soaked jeans on the long train home worthwhile.

After graduating, Saget moved back to Los Angeles, intending to earn a master’s degree in film from USC, but instead continued to work as a bachelor. He quickly became a regular at Mitzi Shore’s Comedy Store, where he met comedians like David Letterman, Jay Leno, Kevin Nealon, Sam Kinison and Jim Carrey. Saget researched their sets while working on her own, then eventually went on tour, being chosen as the opening act for Kenny Loggins.

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His first big break came when he won a spot on “The 9 Young Young Comedians Special,” which premiered on HBO in 1985. The event was hosted by Rodney Dangerfield, who soon became a mentor for young comics. “He always encouraged me,” Saget wrote. The two became so close that when Dangerfield died, Saget gave him a funeral.

Within two years, Saget joined the cast of “Full House” to replace the series’ original lead role. The film, which revolves around a widow raising three daughters with the help of both her brother-in-law and his best friend, was heavily criticized by critics. Howard Rosenberg called it “a birth control controversy” in the Los Angeles Times. However, fans found Saget loved for 8 full seasons.

“For people my age,” Mindy Kaling tweeted, “he was the original Hot Dad.”

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In 1989, Saget also became the host of “America’s Funniest Home Videos”. (He worked on both shows at the same time.) The series, which featured viewer-submitted at-home video clips of the crazy pet bugging out and human stunts going wrong terrible mistake – like a pre-internet era TikTok – not intended to last very long, but it soon defeats “60 minutes” during its Sunday evening period, making Saget a star.

Throughout their rise to stardom, tragedy continued to haunt the Saget family. In 1984, his beloved sister Andi died of scleroderma. For the rest of his life, Saget donated money to research and help people with the disease. A few years later, his first wife, Sherri, passed away after a difficult C-section. Her doctors tried to revive her, but fear left Saget affected to his core.

Before long, he discovered he needed to cope with his pain the same way his father did: by enjoying darker humor. He started to blow off steam by telling funny jokes privately with his friends. The hiI’s stand is finally getting greener and greener. In 2007, Saget filmed his own HBO special, “That Ain’t Right”, revealing his more vulgar side for the first time to many “Full House” and “American Funniest Home Videos” fans. .

Saget is not a telling stories comedian. He joked. He is practically in his delivery, speaking to his audience as if he were just chatting in the living room with his friends. His normal, middle-class personality – Saget is generally a good-natured Jewish boy – creates a stark contrast to his material. His jokes about himself are funny too, but they’re nothing like what you’d expect from a guy like him, and that just makes them even funnier. Watching him work was like eating a big piece of forbidden fruit.

Saget’s most memorable instance of working blue is his appearance in “Noble,” a 2005 documentary about an outrageous joke in the legend Told by dozens of famous comedians. The joke begins with a seemingly innocuous opening – “This family walks into a talent agent’s office…” – and ends with the talent agent asking, “You call this action. what?” followed by the family’s reply: “Nobility!”

What happens between those two points is what makes the joke work. The middle varies between comedians, but is usually a few improvisations designed to make the audience a little nervous.

Saget’s version, however, was seven minutes long (and rife). His marginalized references — no content warning large enough to do this list justice — include murder, incest, fishing, diarrhea, urine, vomiting, illness. hemorrhoids and rape, among others. (Somehow, he also checked the names of both of them Three idiots and Sister Sledge along the way.) Among comedians, Saget’s performance is notorious.

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Contemporary audiences may actually know Saget’s voice more than his face. From 2005 to 2014, he voiced the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother”. After publishing His memoir “Dirty Daddy” in 2014, Saget returned to the role that launched his career, reprising his performance as Danny Tanner on “Fuller House” Netflix-produced sequel to the original series that ran from 2016 to 2020.

In the days shortly before his death, Saget was back on the road to standing up, as he always did, developing new materials. “I’m back to comedy,” he wrote on Instagram, “like me when I was 26 years old.” Sadly, after the final two shows in Orlando and Jacksonville, tragedy strikes again at Saget.

John Stamos, his “Full House” co-star, wrote in an Instagram post that Saget “made us laugh until we cried. Now our tears flow with sadness, but also with gratitude for it all. all fond memories of our sweet, kind, funny, and cherished memories Bob.”

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