Bob Saget Is Not Just Another ‘Dirty Daddy’

Bob Saget wants you to know that behind his humor lies a world of pain. Well, pain and penis jokes. The 57-year-old actor-comedian has written a memoir that is remarkably mature in its treatment of death and grieving, even if those darker moments are punctuated by jokes most fit for the 8-18 crowd. In Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian, Saget retraces his path from a butcher’s son in a family plagued by tragedy, through the grueling days of stand-up, to landing the gig on Full House, hosting America’s Funniest Home Videos and then imploding his own family-friendly image in projects like The Aristocrats and Entourage. As they say, It was a mess of good years… (Sorry — he likes to quote Frank Sinatra. A lot.)

Here are 10 fun facts Bob Saget reveals in Dirty Daddy:

This is the first joke Saget ever wrote down, at age 17.
“I have the brain of a German shepherd and the body of a 16-year-old boy … and they’re both in the trunk of my car and I want you to see them.” He later realized this joke was inspired by an old Groucho Marx line: “I’ve got the brain of a four-year-old. I’ll bet he was glad to be rid of it.” Even as a youth he already knew how to steal from the best.

Saget’s first paying stand-up gig was at Beaver College.
The Western Pennsylvania college now goes by the safer name of Arcadia. “Oh, how I wish I had gone there,” Saget muses of the once all-women’s school. As any good comedian knows, the rest of this joke writes itself.

Pauly Shore’s mom gave Saget his first regular comedy gig.
In 1978 Mitzi Shore offered Saget a regular spot at her famed L.A. venue, the Comedy Store on Sunset Boulevard. This was after she saw him perform in L.A. when he was in town to receive the Student Academy Award for a documentary he made about his nephew called Through Adam’s Eyes. That’s right — he’s also an esteemed (student) documentarian, folks.

Saget was the audience warm-up comedian for the sitcom Bosom Buddies.
He even appeared on the show once. His part was so small that Tom Hanks graciously gave him a name when the writers didn’t: “Bob the Comic.”

One particularly inappropriate joke he made has haunted him his whole life — and helped reshape his career.
When Saget’s first of two daughters was born, his friend Paul Provenza came to see the baby. After Provenza observed that she was “very beautiful,” Saget told him that for a dollar he could … well, it’s better to look this one up on your own, if you’re so inclined. The moral of the story is that the joke was so inappropriate that when Provenza went on to direct The Aristocrats many years later, he asked his old friend Bob to help tell one of the most perverse jokes in the history of comedy. Doing so helped propel Saget from sitcom daddydom to stand-up kingdom.

He did once change the Olsen twins’ diaper.
He doesn’t remember which twin — Mary-Kate or Ashley — but he does remember that a certain smell was pervading a particularly long take one day so he did his “fatherly duty” and changed the diaper. Saget maintains that the Olsens are like surrogate daughters to him to this day, as are his other Full House children, Candace Cameron Bure and Jodie Sweetin.

John Stamos was bitter when the dog who played Comet on Full House went on to star in Air Bud.
Saget warns against envying people whose careers are made seemingly overnight with this cautionary tale of when his TV dog landed the lead role in the classic ’90s family movie Air Bud. He remembers Stamos saying, “Fuck that dog! How’d the dog get a movie and not us?” The dog died a year later. Success is relative — especially in dog years.

Saget and Stamos are brilliant pranksters.
The pair were once using the restroom at the Laugh Factory in L.A. when a young guy walked in to use the urinal next to them. To mess with the poor fella, Saget and Stamos started talking to each other as their Full House characters, referring to each other as “Danny” and “Jesse” and chatting about their onscreen kids. The guy was caught so off-guard that Saget swears “he peed all over himself.”

Saget’s favorite boy band is Jesse and the Rippers.
Stamos’ fictional band from Full House is a biased choice for sure, but who can argue the wonder of, as Saget calls them, those “mullets gone wild?”

Bob Saget is a Titanic movie conspiracist, just like the rest of us.
“Rose could’ve shared the door with Jack,” he insists. It’s unclear why this topic even made it into his book, but Saget is right on target with calling out this major flaw in James Cameron‘s romantic epic.

“If Leonardo DiCpario had played a working stand-up comic,” Saget quips, “he would’ve asked for a piece of the door.”

Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian by Bob Saget (It Books, an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 264 pages, $26.00)