TV veteran Saget blends crude jokes and big heart
Most people know Bob Saget as the amiable actor who graced our television sets in the 1990s as single dad Danny Tanner on the sitcom “Full House” and as the host of “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Others know him as a stand-up comic who revels in filth and is largely credited with delivering the foulest take in “The Aristocrats,” Penn Jillette’s 2005 documentary on the world’s dirtiest joke. In truth, Saget is a sweet soul with a penchant for the profane.
Last month, he released a new special, “Zero to Sixty,” a title that plays off his age (Saget is now 61) and his tendency to riff at rapid-fire speed. Now back on the road with a tour that hits Berkeley’s UC Theatre on Saturday, Dec. 9, he credits his father with shaping his warped sense of humor, which was often employed as a means of coping with tragedy.
“My father was a child of the Depression era,” Saget says. “He raised five siblings. His father passed away at an early age, so he had the bur-
den of the world on his hands.”
Later, he lost his two daughters, Saget’s sisters — Andrea, to an aneurysm, and Gay, to the then-little-known disease scleroderma. Saget recalls going with his father to visit Gay in her hospital room.
“This stranger got on the elevator with us, and she’s crying, and my dad says to her, ‘Has anyone told you that you look very lovely today?’ Nowadays you’d be sued for saying something like this, but he was 70 years old. She just looked up at him like an angel had spoken to her,” Saget recalls. “He found a way to make people laugh in his own style, and I just looked up to him so much for that.”
So in his own way, Saget is paying tribute to his father, bringing the laughs not only to television audiences but on the stand-up circuit, where Saget has been active for nearly 30 years. He recalls being the first comedian to play Cobb’s Comedy Club at its former home on Chestnut Street in the Marina District, and later being asked to play the venue’s final shows before it moved to Fisherman’s Wharf in 1987, the club’s second location before making North Beach its home.
Having moved from his native Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1978, Saget honed his skills by watching comics of the day, including Billy Crystal, Robin Williams and Michael Keaton. He credits each of them with ultimately influencing his own method of stand-up, a blend of snappy punchlines, crowd work and crass musings.
“They were machine-gunning the audience,” Saget recalls. “Michael would do these really thoughtful, funny, brilliant conceptual pieces, but there was still this high energy to it. You might as well have a Tasmanian devil get out of a crate and get onstage with the way comedians were operating in the early ’80s.”
Beyond his work as an actor and a comic, Saget has also spent time behind the camera, directing feature films like 1998’s “Dirty Work,” as well as the 1996 ABC feature “For Hope,” which offered a fictionalized account of his sister’s battle with scleroderma. Saget has subsequently gone on to raise more than $40 million toward scleroderma research, and credits the film with raising public awareness for the disease.
“We put it on the map for the very first time,” Saget says. “Because of that movie, people — mostly women — went and got checked. You can’t put a price on that.”
Saget is also enjoying the chance to educate the largely college-age audiences he’s found himself playing to in recent years. He feels that younger comics who deal primarily in brutal takedowns are not living up to the “knock them down but help them back up” mentality embraced by legends like Don Rickles.
“I guess what I teach through example is how you treat people. If you just look at someone and go, ‘Hey, you’ve got s— teeth,’ that’s not a joke. That’s just cruelty. It’s not like Don Rickles. He would grab people out of the audience and give them trouble, but then he would thank them all. It was so sweet,” he says. “It’s the way it should be done.”
As Saget’s own career continues, he says the work of luminaries like Rickles and most, importantly, his father, continue to guide his choices as a comedian and a man.
“I’m really happy with the age I’m at,” he says. “I’ll probably feel different when my toes start falling off, but I really love bringing happiness to people. The idea of being able to comfort someone, especially when they’re in pain, is a gift. I want to be my dad in that elevator.”
“He found a way to make people laugh in his own style, and I just looked up to him so much for that.” Bob Saget, about his father