Photography by Brian Friedman
Every time that Bob Saget calls a reporter, he says, they always laugh before responding to his hello. (This reporter is guilty as charged.) The fact is, the voice of America’s Non-Problematic Dad is so ground into the aural DNA of a generation—it’s him!—that a joyful giggle or two can't be helped.
Saget has four shows at Helium Comedy Club, at 7:30 and 10 p.m. July 30 and 31. Whatever you’re expecting from the comic, you’re probably wrong. “What I love about my standup right now is it’s so different from anything I’ve ever done,” Saget says by phone from Clearwater, Florida, ahead of a show there. “It has its share of immature jokes, but it’s not shock.”
There’s music, for instance, which has always been part of his standup routine. These days, he’s into positivity. “I close my show with a song called ‘I Don’t Do Negative.’”
Saget, who looks forward to sharing the stage with opener Mike Young, has been working out new material on the tour, and he expects to film a new special by the end of the year. Being onstage, he says, has never felt more urgent. “Standup—I need it so bad right now,” he says.
In addition to his decades of standup work, Saget is of course known for his role as squeaky-clean sitcom dad Danny Tanner on Full House (1987–1995), hosting family-friendly showcase America’s Funniest Home Videos (1989–1997), and providing the voice of the future Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother (2005–2014).
His standup, though, is for adults. Saget has written, starred in, and directed movies, TV, and plays, none of it necessarily kid-friendly. If you search YouTube, you can find a clip of a lanky young Saget on HBO’s 9th Annual Young Comedians Special in 1984, introduced by none other than Rodney Dangerfield.
Very patiently, as if he’s perhaps done it hundreds of times before, Saget dismisses the notion that audiences ought to be shocked to hear a four-letter word escape him onstage. “Anybody that believes that a sitcom character is how they are in real life, I don’t know why it needs to be entertained,” he says. “Danny Tanner—who? Thirty-five years later?”
More recently, Saget appeared as Squiggly Monster on The Masked Singer, as well as two episodes of I Can See Your Voice. In March, he traveled to the Cayman Islands to shoot the film Blue Iguana alongside Joel David Moore, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Carly Chaikin, Jason Jones, and Iggy Pop.
Lately, Saget’s also made a foray into the world of podcasting, a timely outlet during pandemic-enforced isolation. “I really love it very, very much,” he says. “It’s called Bob Saget’s Here for You. I did two episodes in studio, and then the world shut down.”
Plenty of people used the phone to stay in touch with friends and family during the pandemic. It’s just that Saget’s friends (for instance, Norman Lear, Tiffany Haddish, Whoopi Goldberg, Jason Sudeikis, Jake Tapper, David Portnoy...) happen to be brilliant, famous, and willing to have the conversation be entirely for public consumption.
Conversational interviewing is a natural extension of his earliest work, in fact. “I started on a talk show before I got Full House,” he says. “I got fired because I was too much me. They did the right thing.”
The ever-humble Saget has learned a thing or two from his guests over the course of the podcast—and even, astonishingly, from YouTube commenters. He had viral video sensation Randy Rainbow as a guest, and commenters let Saget know he’d been stepping all over Rainbow, so he invited Rainbow back and talked a lot less.
“I know I’m good at conversing with people, but I got better in the past year at listening, and that’s the strongest thing I’ve learned,” he says. “I don’t try to jump in to score like I used to.”
Comedy and popular culture, Saget says, are having a reckoning right alongside the rest of the world. #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and other movements are welcome and overdue, he says. “One of the good things that’s coming out now, which is hard for a lot of people to see, the needle is getting moved,” Saget says. “A lot of people just want to live their lives and laugh and not change too much, but if we don’t change, you’re going to be holding back a whole universe of people that have been held back forever.”
In that vein, he’s got a few regrets and moments that don’t sit well taken out of context. His book Dirty Daddy, he says, would have a different title if it came out today, for instance. He’s had the HBO special that he recorded during the Full House and America’s Funniest Home Videos years taken down, despite its being nominated for a CableACE award. And his infamous and eye-poppingly filthy segment on the 2005 movie The Aristocrats haunts him. “It was a documentary about free speech,” Saget says. “People take it out of context, and they go, ‘That’s what he is.’ No! I told [the joke] twice! That’ s not something I’m proud of. It’s all within context, a hundred comedians saying something you shouldn’t say.”
As pandemic restrictions ever so slowly fade, Saget has been thrilled to be the first act as some of the venues reopen on tour. (Helium in St. Louis has been open since early spring.) Saget says he doesn’t want to court controversy or pick a side, but some things, he says, aren’t up for debate—or shouldn’t be, at least. “I do think people should get vaccinated. It seems to be working in my life!” he says.
Saget started touring right before the pandemic, and he says he could feel so much tension in audiences, with politics as blood sport and an us-versus-them mentality in place. Some comics—ones he loves and respects, such as Dave Chapelle (with whom he performed in May) and Bill Burr—lean head-on into controversy and contention. But that’s just not him.
“It depends on what you think a standup’s job is,” he says. “It’s an exchange. I want people to leave with a feeling of positivity. I’m 65 years old—I’m not out here to shock anybody.”
