Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (12 page)

Many years later, when he started to succumb to multiple sclerosis, I visited him at his house, where I had the honor of getting to hang out with him a little. We spent the time watching his new wide-screen rear-projection TV together. It was hard to see one of my heroes in that state—such an amazing talent. I saw him a couple times after that, and the last time was not long before he died, at a shoot for a Showtime pilot that Eddie Griffin was portraying Richard in.

I went upstairs at the location to see him and gave him a hug. His MS had taken away most of his physical control, but he was still there. As I walked upstairs, I noticed Pat O’Brien was in the building and
Access Hollywood
was filming every moment surrounding Richard. I whispered something in Richard’s ear so the cameras couldn’t hear. A couple days later, when the program aired, they showed me whispering in close-up while synthesizer strings played in the background. The narration said “. . . and Bob Saget was one of the few people to make Richard laugh that day.”

What I’d whispered in his ear was that my youngest daughter couldn’t sleep the night before, so she came into my room and lay in bed next to me. My issue was I’d been having diarrhea that night. So I described to Richard how I was afraid all night that I was going to shit the bed with her in it. He started to laugh, so I kept describing my paranoia of blasting my bowels all over the walls, like spin art. Explosive diarrhea, my A-game.

I wish I’d spent more time with him and been able to say I was an actual “friend” of Richard’s. A lot of people who work with legends like Pryor tend to spew out what good “friends” they are with them. Richard Pryor was an icon to me. He was the King. A significant mentor also—especially after the three weeks I spent with him in High Point, North Carolina, shooting
Critical Condition
. He let me in to hang a little bit and know and learn from him. I know some of the people who were his true friends. And they were fortunate people. I was fortunate to just know the man and have the time I got to spend with him.

I had some very memorable conversations with Richard during my three weeks of shooting in High Point. We were hiding in a hospital alcove waiting to be cued. There was a bit of time to kill. One of those scrubbing pads was on a medical tray in the room with us. It had a soft side like one you clean pots with and on its other side, hard plastic bristles. Richard pointed at it and said, “You see this side,” indicating the hard bristle side, “That’s the side they took my skin off with after the fire.” There was no laughing to be had, just a discussion about pain. And then we were needed in the scene, so the switch was flipped to go back to work. I was struck by what a hardcore and yet gentle man he was.

The scene we were about to do wasn’t intended to have any laughs in it. Richard and I were
in places
, and there was this dead guy being wheeled by us on a gurney. My line as the young Dr. Joffe was something like “They found this guy washed up in the drink.” I can’t remember it, but it was about the bloated dead actor on the gurney. I had to deliver the line to Richard and every time I looked at the drenched guy on the gurney I laughed my ass off. I mean, he was a wet bloated dead guy on a gurney. I was in character for all the other scenes, but every time I looked at this dead guy and then up to Richard to deliver the line, I lost it. Then he lost it. I think it was like twenty takes. The director, Michael Apted, could not have been more patient.

One of the things I asked Richard, which I’ve asked a lot of comedians, is: “When did you know you were funny?” Richard said, “I was four.” I related to that because that’s when I knew it too. And yes, I am aware I was in the presence of Richard Pryor. I know I will never be that great a stand-up and would never presume that I am. He was a comedic genius. I realize it was like asking Albert Einstein “if he liked ice cream too.” I was just excited that I shared that with him, that we both thought we were funny at four years old.

Flashing back, only one year after I did that movie with Richard, I was certain I would never work in show business again. I’d been back in Los Angeles from High Point, and at that time in my life, working in a Paramount film with Pryor was itself a
high point
. Had a few stand-up gigs, but the phone didn’t ring much. Okay, it did, but it was my mother.

The stereotypical neurotic unhealthy show business cliché is that you work in something good and then assume, during the quiet times that follow, you will never work again. A bit extreme, but it can happen, and when it’s years between significant gigs, it feels like forever. The key during those times is to just live your life, be a human first, and not let show business define you. It’s also helpful during the droughts of nonwork to not get hit by a bus.

So during the six months that followed the release of the film, the movie hadn’t yet led to bigger things like I had hoped. But on the brighter, human, more important,
life
side of a comedian/actor’s fucked-up psyche, I had just gotten married to my high school girlfriend and we were going to have our first child.

I’d been told a new baby brings you luck and I still believe this to be true. Babies are so cute and positive. They are the human being we are meant to be before our environment corrupts and morphs us. Unless you’re born a mean evil baby, which I’ve seen only a couple times. That’s a drag. When you meet a
mean baby,
right? When you go over to the bassinet to look lovingly at the little bundle of joy and the kid gives you a glare that just says, “Fuck you.” Now perhaps he just shit himself or hasn’t been held in a while, but still . . . When you see a rotten negative little thing like that, it makes you believe in past lives, makes you think: What the hell happened to this mean little fucker at the end of his last incarnation? Mean little evil bastard baby. He’ll be a wonderful agent one day.

While my wife was pregnant, my career started to gain steam. Again, not a life-affirming perspective, but many a comedian’s mind-set before they’ve had therapy. Not only had I begun appearing every few months on
The Tonight Show
but I got a job on a CBS show called
The Morning Program
and moved to New York. I was hired as a kind of sidekick, appearing on the show every day from seven to nine
A
.
M
., same time as the
Today
show and
Good Morning America
. It was a huge break for me but I had a sense after four months that I might not last.

Part of this had to do with a very traumatic event that happened in my personal life. I debated whether or not to include it in the book, as it was truly one of the most nightmarish moments ever for me and my family. Especially for my ex-wife. Not to ruin the surprise for you, but I must tell you that it ended well. Very well. My ex-wife and I have been divorced since 1998. The good ending was having a healthy baby and her healthy mother.

Seriously, I wouldn’t be telling this difficult story if I hadn’t been given my ex-wife’s and my oldest daughter’s sanctions to do so. It seems like a lifetime ago. To be honest, until writing this book, I had not been able to fully give this incident thought or go to the place I was at when it all happened.

One of my revolving jokes that year was, “I married my girlfriend of seven years—that’s her age.” Well, it wasn’t her age; she was my high school girlfriend. We got married in 1982 and in 1987 she was about to give birth to our first child. I took a leave of absence from
The Morning Program
as a paternity leave.

It all started with her having a difficult labor that wouldn’t end. We went to the hospital as young excited parents, euphoric to have our first kid. We stayed up all night in a labor room and by the early morning she needed to have a C-section.

While they administered the epidural, they went into my wife’s spinal column incorrectly with the needle and the meds went into her bloodstream. Please forgive my pedestrian medical translation here. From my best recollection, her heartbeat got very faint and slowed to the point where the anesthesiologist had to inject her with epinephrine (adrenaline). Her heart rate picked up—but it raced to a high of 180 and then suddenly flatlined. The hospital called a code blue and roughly thirty plainclothes doctors and nurses descended into the operating room. I was told to stand behind the green line on the floor.

The doctors pounded on her chest to bring her heartbeat back, and they succeeded. They stabilized her and put three different catheters into her heart, nose, and mouth to remove the fluids from the IV that had basically drowned her. At the same time, they operated and took my daughter safely out. I was only getting bits and pieces of information, as we do in these hospital crisis situations. One nurse told me my wife had no brain activity. At that moment I was standing alone in a hallway believing my wife was in a coma and that I might never see her or my new baby daughter.

I stood there in shock for a while until finally . . . I saw my daughter. They wheeled her out in a bassinet to take her to intensive care, as they do with traumatic births. She was also a bit jaundiced.

Though it was all happening as if in slow motion, I’ll never forget the first moment I saw her. The nurse, who was wheeling her in a sealed incubator, was crying. She pulled it together and said to me as lucidly as she could, “This is your daughter.” I remember looking at my baby and wanting to hold her—even though she was in the incubator—but also feeling like this was all a dream, like it was happening to someone else and I was just looking in.

My heart goes out to anyone who has gone through this. Or worse. I must share that this whole incident reinstilled in me a love for and faith in medical people—how they do their best and how even the most seemingly unsympathetic doctors and nurses are there for you emotionally when these horrific moments happen to people.

It felt like hours went by. They continued to stabilize my wife while I ran downstairs to the lobby to tell both sets of our parents what had happened. They hadn’t let my new daughter’s grandparents come upstairs, so they were all four trapped in the lobby, panicked beyond belief. I remember their faces as I told them everything, their looks of horror—but also strength. I was the messenger.

My father’s eyes welled up; he didn’t say a word, but he looked at me with love and courage. It was the look I’d seen in his eyes too many times before throughout our lives. The look that said, “We will get through this.” I’ll remember for the rest of my life that look my father gave me. He gave it to me a lot. That’s how you define what a great father is. That look.

I went back upstairs and spent another hour waiting. I was in the labor room where we had waited in presurgery during her labor, and I remember sitting there silently just praying. I was raised Jewish, but at that moment, I prayed to every deity that mankind has conjured. I prayed to God, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, the Universe, Nothing, and I think I even mentioned Yoda. I prayed for my wife’s life and for my daughter’s life.

After what seemed like an eternity, I was standing outside the operating room as they finally wheeled out my wife, unconscious and wired up with the heart, throat, and nose catheters. Even though she was unconscious, I started talking to her, telling her everything I wanted to say: “You can’t die . . . We just had a new baby and she’s healthy . . .”

Nurses were standing around crying, I was crying, everyone was crying. Then, suddenly, in an instant, her eyes opened. She became fully conscious and agitated. The nurses called doctors over and everyone calmed her down, as of course, she was in shock. After a nightmare of harrowing proportions, a miracle had occurred.

I was able to see my daughter right away and give her Similac since her mom was in intensive care for several days recovering. I held the bottle at my chest as if I was really breast-feeding her, maybe thinking I could fake her out. I don’t know why I did that. Traumatic situations sometimes call for odd behavior. I used to have a joke to that effect: “Men can breast-feed. I read that. Okay, I wrote it down and then I read it.”

After six long difficult days at the hospital, my baby and her reincarnated mother were finally able to come home to our apartment. The trauma was over. What was left was healing and recovery. We had a live-in nurse for the next couple weeks and I was about to go back to work at the CBS show. We had been through hell and back. My wife and I would never be the same. But even in the darkest moments, humor always emerged. And as things started to get back to normal, the gallows-humor devils inside me were creeping back into my recovering psyche. Never appropriate, never printable, but always there. It’s a twisted comic gene that’s inbred in me, for better or for worse. And it didn’t take long, post-trauma, for it to come out.

An old comic friend, whom I knew from my college days, when I did comedy at the University of Pennsylvania, Paul Provenza, and another friend, publicist Jackie Green, stopped by our apartment on the Upper West Side to say hi and see my new kid. They were the first visitors we’d had since both sets of grandparents had returned to Philly.

Paul and Jackie were only coming over for a moment. It was a very emotional, intimate moment; they had tears in their eyes as I came to the door holding my baby. Her mom was recovering, napping down the hall. Paul and Jackie walked into the entryway, their eyes filled with tears as they saw my new baby in my arms. Paul said, “She’s very beautiful.”

[FREEZE FRAME]

Now, this is hard to explain, but here’s what followed. Please understand it came in the aftermath of a hugely traumatic event—and I am by nature a comedian who, as a defense against his own unbearable pain, goes straight to the most tasteless joke that can be conjured. I decide to share it here, as it’s already been put into the ether. It was called out in print by a smart, stealthy writer, George Gurley, who did a story on me in the
New York Observer,
and as if that’s not enough, it is featured inside the extras on the
Aristocrats
DVD.