Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (30 page)
Over the years, people have asked me, “Why have you chosen this style of comedy? Are you trying to shock people?” That always comes out of left field for me. I didn’t choose for my comedy to be scatological, immature, and what some people call dirty.
I’m just here to entertain people and make them laugh. And I’m not trying to prove that I’m not clean-cut. I don’t even understand the concept of that. My most recent special,
That’s What I’m Talkin’ About,
is, for whatever reason, less dirty than my previous one. I know, “Good for you, Bobby.” Fist-bumps. Shaka, brah.
When
That Ain’t Right
came out in 2007, Don Rickles said to me, “Bob, I just saw your last special. It was very good. You left out two
fuck
s.” And he slapped me in the face. And then he kissed me. I love that man. He’s an original. Don never cursed in his act, which is amazing because he was always so cutting.
It’s so cool to see Don and his friend Bob Newhart and their wives out to dinner. Newhart has also been one of my favorite comedians over the years. Sometimes Don does this impression of me to Newhart, which is of course an honor, where he mimics me and pretends he’s singing a song by me that represents my stand-up. I’ve never actually uttered these lyrics, but Don has done this routine so many times I feel like it’s real. It goes like this . . .
First, he sums up my looks as a “Jewish Clark Kent” and then he sings the lyrics as he imagines my act to be: “ . . . And the monkey fucked the dog and the dog fucked the monkey . . .” All the while, as he’s singing this, he’s miming me playing the guitar.
Don curses for me because he knows it makes me laugh, especially coming from him. I’ve actually never talked dirty to the man myself. I don’t really talk dirty to anyone much anymore unless there are a lot of people around. That’s not a very tough thing to figure out the psychology of.
It’s a strange yin and yang, the two sides of my work that I’m known for. I’m actually four-sided. But I’ve been doing more cardio.
Honestly, I do a lot of things that aren’t blue or dirty, but nowadays people only remember the blue. Someone will mention my name to someone else who knows nothing about my work and the word-on-the-street response I hear a lot is “You know that dad from
Full House
? I hear he’s dirty.” Oh man. What to do . . . What to do . . .
I love that so many different demographics know me for different things. I was at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center just outside of Washington, DC. I love going there whenever I’m performing in the Capital. It is always an honor to meet some of our servicemen and women.
Several years ago when I visited, a very cool soldier asked me to come over to him. I joined him. Then he got very serious. He was smiling and kind, but he was serious: “I got a problem with you, Bob . . . I sat down to watch a show on HBO with my nine-year-old boy and it was you doing your stand-up.”
He went on to explain that his son had wanted to watch the dad from
Full House
. The solider told me that he wasn’t paying attention at first because he saw me on the television and he didn’t know the tone of my comedy. After a minute he turned around because he started to actually hear what I was saying.
I felt terrible about it and told him, “When you see me on TV and it’s on cable, please, sir, turn off the sound. I look like I’m saying nice stuff when the sound’s off.”
I told him how bad I felt and then he grabbed me and laughed and said he was just messing with me. But he was serious too. I did feel bad about that—except I assume by now his son’s probably watched the whole thing a few times with his friends online.
If you watch my stand-up with the sound muted, I’d like to think I look like someone you can trust. Like your dentist—or your proctologist. What’s the rest of that joke—“They both reached into the guy at the same time and shook hands in the middle.”
One thing that’s not a lot of fun for anyone is to be told who you look like. It’s never good, even if the famous people they say you look like may be very attractive in their own way. I’m certain when people are told they look like me, they don’t always jump for joy. Someone somewhere probably has though. Nahh.
I’ve been told I bear a resemblance to the following individuals: Bill Nye the Science Guy, Anthony Weiner, Rick Santorum, and Stephen Colbert. The only one of those comparisons that makes me genuinely happy is Colbert. That makes me gleeful. I’d be honored to look in the mirror and see
his
reflection. And I’d much rather hear his words than my own. I’m not that self-loathing; I just have a huge man-crush on Stephen Colbert. Forget how much smarter he is than me. No, I mean it—forget it.
I don’t do well with look-alike doppelganger comparisons. Another thing I don’t do well with is haters. Some performers don’t let these people get to them or even get into their consciousness. Others feed it and thrive on the hate. So weird. It’s bad enough to read a bad review—which we all know is not a healthy thing to do . . . unless you write them.
The Internet has opened the door wide to the world of haters
.
I’m a viral kind of guy so I know that being on Twitter itself is just asking for it. But thankfully, I see a lot more lovers than haters. And the haters I get, if I happen to see them I block ’em. I just don’t need to do negative anymore.
When you perform live, eventually you’re going to make direct eye contact with that one guy in the audience with his arms folded staring back at you. But I process it differently now. Maybe I misread that guy. Maybe he was just cold or checking his armpits for sweat or just had a really bad day.
And the great thing is, if I ever need a counterpoint to the arms-folded guy, I can just go right to my Twitter account and read, “@bobsaget is my favorite person in this entire world.”
And then at the last minute I can decide not to post it.
As I wrote this book, a lot of people asked me if I had a ghostwriter. The answer is yes. It was Ernest Hemingway. And my house is full of his ghost vomit and urine. Hemingway said something that helped me get through this, my first book: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Things are cyclical. As I finish this book, I am reminded of how it began—with a laptop on my crotch. Hemingway did not have that luxury. I have had the good fortune to warm my testicles up while I write. With a typewriter in his lap for an entire book, Mr. Hemingway would’ve been ruined.
For Whom the Balls Toll. To Have and to Have Not . . . Balls. The Old Man and His Crushed Balls.
So before I close I want to share a quick, non-testicle story about a man in my life whom I miss. He was my friend, the famed comedy manager, producer, and author Bernie Brillstein. He managed a lot of special people, including Jim Henson and Lorne Michaels, to name two.
I was on a trip with four couples, all good friends. I was the fifth couple. One day as the sun set, Bernie and me, just the two of us, were in a Jacuzzi on a boat in the Caribbean—tough times. Well, for me emotionally it was. I was newly single. Again.
Bernie was a jolly man, almost a Jewish Santa Claus, with the loudest laugh full of bravado. When he thought something was funny, you knew. His reaction was loud. And he also had that old-school show business comedic sense that you just don’t see anymore. I loved hanging out with him and asking him stories about his life and the biz.
So, we’re in this Jacuzzi—and I don’t remember what I said to him but he just started to laugh. And he kept laughing. After a few beats he looked at me and said, “You know, Bob, if you could do in your career what you just did in this Jacuzzi, you’d be set for life.” And I said, “What, take a shit?”
Yes, that’s the punch line, but the real takeaway for me was the memory of his laughing at that with the loudest laugh you could hear. Making him laugh that hard was a special moment. Cinematically you’d cut to an extremely wide aerial shot looking down on the yacht and barely be able to make us out hundreds of feet below—but the laugh would be echoing for miles.
What sparked this book was my musings on death and comedy. This is what came out. What I wanted to share were my feelings about how humor gets you through this life and through all the dark times. For me, it’s occasionally irreverent and immature humor. But funny is funny.
Like my friend Rodney Dangerfield used to say, “It is what it is.” As I was adding those words earlier in this book, I was inspired to call my friend David Permut, who was Rodney’s dear friend as well. I don’t call David that much—good friend that I am—and I called him on his cell, unblocked.
David answered the phone: “You’re not going to believe this.”
I said, “What did I do? Have one of those psychic moments that I’m always bragging I have?”
He continued: “Bob, I am standing at this moment on Rodney’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”
He’d had a meeting to go to and visited Rodney’s star because he had a half hour to kill. He hadn’t been there since the day he and I were there for the ceremony when Rodney got the star. The morning he got some “respect.”
A moment of synchronicity like that tells me that everything is where it’s supposed to be. We all have them; they give us chills and let us know we are truly in the present. The key is to remember the moments. Don’t take them for granted.
I learned from everyone I treasure—my daughters, my parents, Don Rickles, all my friends and relatives who went through huge losses our entire childhoods—that humor, however you define it, gets us through the saddest of times.
That was never clearer to me than at my father’s funeral. Everybody loved my dad. He was just funny. Kind, smart, and funny. And full of love. So it was appropriate that he was eulogized comedically.
First up was my uncle Jonah, my dad’s brother-in-law. He gave a loving speech and talked of my dad’s influence and how they watched out for each other. Then he spoke at length about “self-service meats,” which of course was the business he and my dad were in. You can’t beat meat.
When you lose someone close to you, you find out who your friends are. My uncle Jonah was followed by my life-chosen brothers Paul and Brad. What they said touched me to this day.
When my dad passed away, it was unexpected. Tragically, I was not in town when it happened. I was in New York that night on Conan O’Brien’s show promoting the fake documentary I’d made,
Farce of the Penguins
. My dearest friend Brad had this to say at my dad’s funeral:
“They say laughter is the best medicine. Well, not in this case. The last thing Ben was watching was Bob’s direct-to-DVD movie,
Farce of the Penguins
. Ben’s last words were, ‘For the love of God, someone turn this thing off!’ ” Big laugh. Which is exactly what my dad would’ve wanted.
I closed. I had an “okay set.” Did a tight twenty and cried in the appropriate spots. I loved that man so much. It’s an amazing thing when your dad is your hero.
My dad went through a sea of deaths. The oldest of six, he buried his four younger brothers and four of his children. Yes, I was it.
His philosophy after grieving was to laugh. To try to bring some joy to others, because life is just so hard sometimes. Because it ends.
My father also had a huge amount of dignity. This Mark Twain quote sums up the way my father and mother felt about life: “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
As crazy and dark as I would imagine some of these stories sounded, I am very proud of the life I have led so far. I have a lot of love in my life. And a lot of laughs. And I wish that for you all.
I wish that even for the guy in the audience with his arms folded.
As I was writing this book over the past year and a half, I began noticing that some of the events and themes described within—loved ones becoming ill and how comedy gets us through our pain—were coming true yet again. How crazy that I was basically living out many of the tragic moments from the book, once more, as I was writing it. I found it ironic yet also sweetly poignant that life goes in cycles. As the book went to press, I lost my loving mother at the age of eighty-nine. A beloved wife, mother, grandmother, aunt, and friend, she touched countless lives through the generations and will always be remembered. This is for you, Mom.
Dolly Saget, 1925–2014
Bob Saget is a Grammy-nominated stand-up comedian, actor, and television host. It was his family-friendly roles as the sweetly neurotic Danny Tanner on
Full House
and as the original host of
America’s Funniest Home Videos
that made Saget a household name, but it is his edgy stand-up routines, comedy specials, and appearances in
The Aristocrats
and
Entourage
that solidified his reputation as a true original with a dirty sense of humor and unique personality. Although he has been performing raunchy stand-up for over thirty years now, it was only after he shattered his family-friendly image with the film
The Aristocrats
that Americans truly got to see the other side of Bob Saget.