Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (13 page)
Years later, I told my daughter the story before she had to read or hear about it. So by the time
The Aristocrats
came out, there was nothing she didn’t know. I have three daughters—and they occasionally have the same sense of humor as me, but not in this case. What can I say. It’s the sense of humor my father had handed down to me. It was an auto-response in the moment. Keep in mind that what I said to Paul Provenza that day—in response to his kind comment while I was holding my first child—came out because I was emotionally drained and had no filters at that instant. No filters at all. Okay, those are all the disclaimers I can think of.
[UN-FREEZE-FRAME]
So I’m holding my baby, we all have tears in our eyes, my wife is sleeping just down the hall, and we’re back with Paul and Jackie where we left off. Paul looks at my baby in my arms and says, “She’s very beautiful.” And I (allegedly) auto-respond back . . .
“You can finger her for a dollar.”
Time stopped. It was one of those gallows jokes that just spewed out. Apologies to the Universe. My poor-taste comedic response poked its irreverent head out of a sea of overwhelming relief warped through tears. The comment halted all three of us for a moment or two and then we broke out in laughter.
Paul Provenza, my houseguest that day, would eventually get older and become, decades later, the director of
The Aristocrats
. During those years, I often denied ever uttering that disgusting and unthinkable comment with the retort “I could never have said that. That’s my daughter we are talking about here. It would’ve been at least for five dollars.”
Anyway, this story traveled for years—not of my doing—among a sick group of comedy misanthropes. This is my breed’s kind of jokey gossip. It’s the humor of these dirty roasts some comedians do, where ethical people say the most reprehensible thing possible to make a point of how unthinkable and evil the actions described really are. It’s an “honor among thieves” type of credo. And this kind of sick humor, comedy based on the worst circumstances in life a human being can go through, was the whole foundation of the movie
The Aristocrats
. But more on that later.
When I’m in certain comedy circles, my oldest daughter, who is now a brilliant twenty-seven-year-old artist, will be asked by other comedians, “Is that true?” And she smiles and nods her head affirmatively. She and her mother know me. And they know it’s the farthest thing from reality. That’s why they and other people close to me find the uncomfortable humor in it. They don’t output that kind of humor, but they understand it.
So, I wasn’t going to include that tale in this book, but my ex-wife said to me, “You
have
to. It’s who you are. It’s what the book is about. It’s about how you and our family dealt with the unthinkable things that have happened.”
I thank her for her encouragement and support in letting this one be told. To be clear and out of respect for her, understandably so, she did
not
sanction, at the time, my delivery of that particular punch line to Paul and Jackie. But she supported my telling the whole story now because it’s representative of what this book is about.
Now, I would like to ask all of you reading this to please keep this story confidential and not share it with others. Let it be just between us. In confidence. Oh wait, this is in a book. Shit.
I have many friends in comedy who have told me, “You
have
to include that story in your book.” Okay, I have. It’s on all your heads now. My main concern was to tell it in a way that my daughter and her mother found palatable. It was a joke. And again, it couldn’t be farther from who I am as a loving father. That is why it was found to be funny by some.
And like
The Aristocrats,
it is not for everyone. If I have offended anyone in the telling of this story, I apologize. I put it in here with as much context as I could. My heart goes out to anyone on this earth whom this is
not
an “in poor taste” joke to. Again, as my friend Rodney Dangerfield said, “It is what it is.” And it was what it was.
So things got back to normal, life went on. Everyone was healthy. I went back to work at CBS. But I think I knew my days there were numbered when they offered to pick me up in a town car every morning at four fifteen
A
.
M
. to get
to
the show, but I’d have to find my own way back to my apartment
after
the show. One-way wannabe stardom at its best. I started to act out on the air. Not very professional but I was a kid, right?
One morning, the host of the show, Mariette Hartley, asked me, “Bob, are you a type-A personality?” My retort was, “Yes, but I’m trying to work on my A-ness.” She told me, on the air, “Go to your room, Bob.” My
room
was a fictional one we’d joke about on the show that was part of the set behind us. I walked upstage and up a set of stairs that led to nowhere. I stood there for maybe ten minutes, until the commercial break. The fuse had been lit. In showbiz they call that a “mutual parting of ways.” I called it “two staircases that led to nowhere.”
I remember my then-manager and still dearest friend, Brad Grey, sitting with me in executive producer Bob Shanks’s office when Shanks—the man who had discovered me in the first place to give me this big shot on morning TV—had to break the news to me: The higher-ups at CBS wanted me out. What I didn’t know until a couple weeks after the firing was that Brad had already been working to help me screen-test for a pilot for a network family sitcom on ABC called
Full House
.
I wasn’t the first choice for the role of Danny Tanner. Betty White was. Not true, but there was another actor whom they had shot the pilot with. And upon seeing the pilot I thought he had done a really good job in it. I actually didn’t understand why they wanted to replace him. The executive producer, Jeff Franklin, said it was because he’d always wanted me for the part but I wasn’t available, since I was in New York doing
The Morning Program
. Jeff Franklin and executive producers Tom Miller and Bob Boyett were about to change my life again. I will always be grateful for that monumental change.
I still have some guilt attached to the whole thing regarding the actor let go, though it was none of my doing. That’s the unhealthy Jewish guilt that can haunt a person for no reason. Even if they’re not Jewish. Even Catholic guilt can be blamed on Jewish guilt. I feel bad about that.
A great actor friend of mine, Joe Mantegna, whom I’d been lucky enough to also work with in
Critical Condition,
gave me some advice: “The minute you get fired from a job in New York, and they aren’t paying you anymore . . . move.” He was right. The cost of living there was high. I calculated it out—it equaled throwing a dollar bill into a bucket every fifteen minutes. Doesn’t sound like much today. But it was for me back then. I’d just been fired from my first job in television.
I adore New York, and I’d love to live there again in my life, but it was time to leave. With a now-living wife and a healthy happy baby under my arm, who’d finally stopped crying, we packed up and moved back to Los Angeles.
PARENTING MY OWN AND OTHER PEOPLE’S KIDS
So far in my life, I have three daughters—that I know of. I love them all equally and immensely. Okay, one of them is my favorite, but I cannot reveal which one until this book is in its incredibly large second printing. Actually, as most people who have more than one kid will tell you, there usually isn’t a favorite. Your favorite is the one you’re with that moment. I am beyond lucky in being able to play such a significant part in raising these three great young women. My daughters are really savvy and smart. They rarely curse, and they’re not dirty ignorant people. They are dignified. How did they spring off from me, you may ask?
They actually reinforce my self-respect. They never judge me for anything I say onstage or in my work, even when it could embarrass them. I’m the only hypocrite in the family. I really want to be a good parent but I know it’s a double-edged sword. How can I tell them to watch their language one minute, and the next minute I’m onstage talking about diarrhea and prison sex? Simultaneously. Hey, shit happens. Especially in prison. When you’re being triple-teamed like a pot of fondue boiling over on the stove. I pray this passage doesn’t come before the grand jury of transitions . . . so, back to my daughters . . .
One of my daughters believes I’m like Benjamin Button, so by the time I’m ninety-five, I will be one year old. I’ll need to be wiped again when I’m an old man, just like when I was a kid. Like in one of my friend Dana Carvey’s best bits, where he portrays an angry old man yelling, “Wipe me! Wipe me!” as though he is once again pre-toilet-trained.
Truthfully, I’d never want that job to have to be done by anyone. Especially by offspring. I like the roles the way they are: “I’m the dad, and you’re supposed to grow up and come to me for stuff when you need me.” I like that kind of setup. And yet, with old age comes a return to innocence, which also leads to incontinence. And that’s if you’re lucky to live a long time. My dream is to live a really long time, just long enough to start pooping my pants and then get taken out before the shit really hits the proverbial fan.
When I was cast as a father on
Full House
—as a conservative, neurotic widowed father of three girls living in San Francisco—I admit I was surprised to land the role. Given my stand-up at the time, which to put it mildly always had a quirkiness to it, you’d think I’d have been cast as a guy who appears to be normal but then goes off the deep end and winds up cooking and eating people.In today’s television climate, that’s certainly where we seem to be headed. Or be-headed. Must. Get. Viewers. “Tomorrow, on NBC—
Cannibal Father:
He loves his family so much, he cuts them up and
eats
them.” The theme song could go: “Everywhere you look, there’s a hand to hack on to . . .”
As I’ve been writing, lots of people have asked me, “What’s your book gonna be about?” My go-to answer’s been: “My book’s about death, comedy, my testicles, and how they all intersect.” The blank stares have been deafening. Then a young guy always asks, “So you’re going to talk all about
Full House,
right?”
So . . . I know I must speak of it because the show and its success are a huge part of what got me to this intersection. You don’t know it when it’s happening until ratings tell you it’s happening. People still come up to me on the street and say, “TGIF,” which was the name of the block of ABC family sitcoms that dominated television for so many years. People think the show was always on a Friday night, but the first few years of
Full House,
it was on Tuesdays. Apparently people didn’t want to watch TGIT. Sounds wrong, especially for kids. Then again, TGIT might’ve brought more eighteen-to-forty-year-old males to the party.
And then there was the confusion with the chain of restaurants TGI Fridays, “Thank God It’s Fridays.” Someone liked that expression so much over the years that they made a movie and then named the restaurants after it. Until I just mentioned it I’d forgotten there was also a movie in 1978, starring Donna Summer, called
Thank God It’s Friday
. I didn’t see it, as I was usually busy on Friday nights.
I wasn’t very religious as a Jewish twenty-one year old, but I did find it funny culturally that the movie had that name. If it had been a giant hit, maybe there wouldn’t have been a TGIF. Maybe it would have been called TGIS—“Thank God It’s Shabbat”—and the restaurant chain would’ve started Fridays with a happy-hour all-you-can-eat latke buffet, with Mogen David wine coolers. That would’ve been enough for us. A’ight, enough of that, apologies once more.
So somehow I got this gift of a job, and one that introduced me to the world of family television—playing the straight guy with two other straight guys on a show about three straight men raising three girls in San Francisco. That’s the bi-line of the show.
It’s still fascinating to me how I came from this edgy-ish comedy background and then this job came along. But I had always loved situation comedy television and it was the kind of job I always wanted, a primetime network sitcom. It was produced by Tom Miller and Bob Boyett, who had made some of the biggest sitcoms of all time.
There was no decision to be made. I’d been fired off a show in New York on CBS, had a new baby to raise, and now was being offered this big family show, on ABC no less. Cut to: me asking the head of wardrobe, “Does it
have
to be a cardigan sweater?”
The sweet father, Danny Tanner, was the personification of fruitiness. His character had originally been conceived, for the pilot, as a guy who basically loved his kids more than anything. But then I worked with the show’s producers to embellish him with some other qualities—his being a hugger and a neurotic compulsive cleaner, kind of in the Felix Unger/
Odd Couple
vein. Hugging people a lot and cleaning 24/7 is . . . well . . . do the math. Whatever it was, it worked.
Over the years, men who would seem physically threatening have sauntered over to me, looked me in the eye, and instead of saying “I fucking hate you,” came at me, their eyes welling up with tears, and said: “You were the daddy I never had, Bob.” It was then I realized the crossover fans
Full House
had accumulated.
After a group man-hug they’d usually shove me into a sidecar of one of their bikes and sweep me into the caves of Griffith Park, where they’d beat me senseless until I repeated for them like a good sitcom actor does, things like: “When do we start shooting? Should I bring the fondue? Oh, I forgot, I don’t have to . . . I
am
the fondue.” That would usually be followed by the words, “Ow-ow-ow that’s my butthole . . .” And other things like that.
I’ve never enjoyed fondue. Maybe it’s because it’s a word that I repeat too much, as well as being a word that’s always found its way into sitcom scripts. Like
flan
and the expression
But I digress
.