Bob Saget - Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian

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 Americas 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.

All photographs courtesy of the author unless otherwise noted.

DIRTY DADDY . Copyright 2014 by Bob Saget. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 978-0-06-227478-6

EPUB Edition APRIL 2014 ISBN: 9780062274786

14 15 16 17 18 OV / RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my brilliant and understanding daughters

As a kid I often heard from my mom, as well as from the teachers in every school I attended, that I needed to behave myself and watch how I spoke. Apparently I was a mischievous little bastard. By the time I started out in stand-up at seventeen, I was careful about my language; this helped me get on television shows and go on the road opening for musicians like Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons and Kenny Loggins.

But one day in my early twenties, I snapped. I didnt want to disappoint my mom, but I couldnt take the censorship of it all. Some of the comedians who fascinated me the mostLenny Bruce, George Carlin, and Richard Pryorhad also felt oppressed by the things you could and couldnt say in public.

On Conan OBriens show he once asked me how I was able to keep it together through my eight years on Full House and not say the wrong things in front of all the child actors. I explained that I would occasionally lose it while we were shooting and arbitrarily yell out things like Cock! Shit! Fuck!

It was a planned bleep, a setup so Conan could ask me on the air something hes always asked me on his show: What is the matter with you?

We were being funny with that exchange, but theres a deeper truth behind it. Its why people go into a life of comedy in the first place. When youre told not to do something, unfortunately, for some of us, is exactly when you do it. No means no. But not to a comedian.

In my career Ive had the fortune of being able to work continually in radically diverse creative worlds. By day Ive done some of the most family-friendly TV imaginable. Then, often in the same day, Ive gone onstage in the L.A. comedy clubs and whirled off with an adolescents delight about my grandmas projectile diarrhea.

That in itself could, by many psychiatrists standards, be a bit of a call for help. I never do it to shock anyone, even though people have sometimes thought of me as a shock comic. If it is a through-line or a constant to what I do, its not something Im proud of. But Im not ashamed of it either. Its more of a handicap. Or, depending on your perspective, a gift. Its what I used to think of as my mania. Now Ive come to embrace it. You have to love yourself. But not in a movie theater, because they will tabloid your ass.

Mostly Ive just always done what I found funny, strange as it may seem. Immature taboo humor ( good immature taboo humor) always made me laugh. I love all kinds of humor, but my love of sick silliness started with my dadwhom youll hear a lot more aboutand his constant dick jokes. He was a grown-up who said things a nine-year-old like me always wanted to say because I was told not to.

Joking has also been a means for me to avoid pain. Ive lost a lot of people, and throughout my childhoodalmost every two yearssomeone in my family died at an unnaturally young age. The more tragedy befell us, the more odd gallows humor I would release. My humor, especially once I started doing it professionally, was always dark and twisted. Like your penis if you accidentally slammed it in the door of a car.

This book is about how that humor helped me survive. Its been inside me for a long time. It has congealed. I am writing what comes out of me. Well, not exactly, or this would be a book about leakage.

The goal of living a full life is so, at its end, youll have learned some things along the journey. Im nowhere near the end yet, but Ive already had some incredible experiences. Ive met and worked with some amazing people, Ive lived, Ive loved, Ive cried...and through it all, I did it my way. In this book Ill talk about many of the people Ive known in my life and in the worlds of comedy and entertainment. Some of them are still around; many are not.

Ive had some dark times, but the thing about dark times is there has to be light at the end of the tunnel. And one great thing about being a man is you can go to bed depressed and feeling negative, but when you wake up in the morning, through no effort of your own, youve got a nice display of morning wood to let you know its the start of a new day. You could be waking up next to the love of your life, or the girl your buddy told you not to talk to the night before because she was a drunken evil vortex. Or you could be totally alone in bed and not sure if you want to get up yetbut hes up. Like a sundial catching the first ray of morning light, casting its shadow on your stomach. Or if you have a tiny penis, casting its shadow directly next to itself, hardly a shadow at all. Or if you have a choad, which Im told is a penis that is wider than it is long, and you were hoping to use it as a sundial but only had, say, an inch of length to it...you could still be proud to look at that tiny stump of wood in the middle of the day and declare to the universe, Its one ocock!

No matter what the size of your penis, what matters most is not size, its honesty, and yes, Im switching to deep sincerity, thats right, from penis size to what really matters in life...the stuff a lot of people take for granted: health, family, friends, human kindness, a love for all living things, and being honest and true.

Honesty, as Billy Joel says, is such a lonely word. And I dont think hes referring to honesty in regard to penis sizeunless yours is truly gigantic, in which case, if you are a compassionate man, have you ever thought of being a donor? Like when you fill out your drivers license form and sign off your organs to science, you could hypothetically, if they allowed it, leave your penis to someone who could use the extra inch-age. Id like to leave my lungs to the American Lung Association and my penis to Marcus, an eighteen-year-old man who awkwardly wanted to talk to me once at a urinal in the Phoenix airport.

As you can see, I have a tough time writing too many words in a row without a dick joke thrown in. Or a shit joke. Or a combination of the two, which you shouldnt do, because as all the great philosophers say, You can get an infection.

My fear at this point is that this book will not be taken seriously, or for some, it may be taken too literally. If the latter is the case, I recommend you see a shrink. I know there are readers of this who probably dont normally read books; they are fans of comedy. I would be remorseful if seventeen-year-old boys who have read just this introduction so far have already turned the book into a drinking gametaking a shot every time the word penis is mentioned. For the safety of those young people, whom I have huge concern for, as they are our future, Id like to hereby change the drinking game cue word to shart a hybrid word ( shit + fart ), which sadly secures no points in Words with Friends.