Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (16 page)

As I mentioned, I’ve been good friends with Dave since long before we were on the show together. We met in Detroit at an open-mic bar called the Delta Lady when he was seventeen and I was twenty-one. When Dave first moved out to L.A., he stayed on my couch in my one-bedroom apartment in an area of Los Angeles called Palms, and pretty much all he did was make fart jokes in between going out with me to the late-night comedy clubs.

Ironically, that was also the whole premise of
Full House
—that my friend Joey Gladstone stayed with me in my “alcove” because he had no place to live. More than ironic that thirteen years before the pilot of that show, Dave really did live with me. And he was cast on the show a year before I was. If
Full House
had been any more real, that alcove would’ve had a toilet smack-dab in the middle of it and smelled like shit. As Dave used to say, it should’ve been called
Out House
.

One of the staple directors of
Full House
was Joel Zwick. I call him a “staple” director because since his days on
Full House,
he has had surgery and his abdomen is held together with staples. Anyway, Joel’s wife is a shrink and one day—in about the seventh season of my double doodies of working on
America’s Funniest Home Videos
and
Full House
—she told me I was having a “manic episode.” I was running around on set, walking on the furniture, without touching the ground, like a little kid does when he pretends he’s walking on rocks to keep from falling in the imaginary river around him.

I was just fooling around. My friends, the entire cast of the show, were crowding around me and coaching me to go crazier to make them laugh. It was often like this: they would enjoy saying to me, “Bob, do something physical and pass out.”

One time I was holding a cup of coffee, and on their cue, I threw it without thinking, onto a wall of high-voltage lighting switches. Luckily, no fire started, the coffee mug just fell to the floor, but I was appropriately scolded by producers like a kid in school getting sent to the principal’s office. And rightfully so. There were people around.

Unless cameras were rolling, I was pretty much not Danny Tanner. Oftentimes I was in a zone of completely committing to that character. People could relate to him. They had fathers and family members he reminded them of. I used to be more like him. I was raised to be more like him.

I was committed to playing someone who possibly should’ve been committed himself. For his OCD neurotic qualities. And yes, I drew from some of my own baggage to help him flourish. I was in real life a yuppie-type father with shades of
The Big Bang Theory
over-the-top character traits.

I am a hugger by nature, and lately I’ve found it’s the best way to avoid touching people. If you’re hugging them you’re usually just touching their clothes, not their skin. I also agree with the Howie Mandel theory of fist-bumping and not clasping someone’s hand to welcome them or say good-bye. I just feel like whenever there’s a situation with lots of handshaking, everyone is thinking the same thing: Where was that guy’s hand before he shook mine?

When a salacious person comes up to you and grabs your hand and doesn’t let go for what seems like an eternity, it can be off-putting. “My God, that guy is so greasy and his hands are Shrek-sized, and he won’t let go . . .” In a case like that, you may want to bypass the hand sanitizer and go right to amputation.

Interesting the meaningless whiny complaints we come up with as human beings, that in the scheme of things are the size of a tick on a gnat’s ass. He opened for me once. Gnats Ass. He was an open-mic-er German comedian.

Okay, one of the weirdest things that I should not share, especially in a book, and especially since I am basically anti-drugs-ish, is this story . . . This is a story that John Phillip Stamos actually told on television. If I was smart I’d let it die post-broadcast, but I think you’ve gathered by now about where my IQ level is at. Gnats Ass.

Before my friend Craig Ferguson took over
The Late Late Show
on CBS in January of 2005, I guest-hosted the show for one night a month earlier. I was the last of the revolving hosts, and shocking as it may seem, my first guest was John P. Stamos. He had warned me he was going to tell a story that showed how crazy I was while we were making
Full House
. I asked him not to, but as usual, I ended up saying, “Oh, you do whatever you want to do.” I love John, so I figured it would be fine.

The story he told on the air was one I am hesitant to share in this book. So hesitant, here it is . . . About six years into
FH,
I was going through a bit of a manic period . . . again. I’d drive off after the show we’d just shot and do stand-up at the clubs in town—Comedy Store, Improv, Laugh Factory.

During that time my family was going through another rough patch. My sister Gay was in the hospital with scleroderma. I’d visit her late at night after having shot the show all day and then go off to do a set of stand-up to let off some steam, then return to Cedars-Sinai hospital to see her.

She was in a bad state and needed some company and love. She had no sense of time, so I didn’t feel bad about showing up at the hospital at two
A
.
M
., which was when she was sometimes just waking up from the meds. I had a wife and kids at home, but after a day of family-television dialogue, I’d release my demons for a little while onstage and then see my sister, who was going through the toughest time a person can go through.

Anyway, back to the story that I really shouldn’t be telling . . . the
Full House
filming that week was a particularly child-friendly episode featuring several little-kid guest actors. I believe it had to do with the character Michelle’s birthday. I’d research it, but it’s painful enough to recall, so I’m comfortable just winging it. Who really needs facts checked for this story? For the episode, there was going to be a birthday cake with lots of whipped cream. It was some kind of slapstick cute silly bit.

Dave, John, and I were waiting backstage. We had been waiting awhile—they were still busy shooting some scenes of Michelle and her friends—and I was getting impatient. “When are they gonna use us? We’ve been backstage for an hour.” Real whiny-actor low-level-thinking sitcom stuff. Meaning—well, just spoiled and bored. Bitch-boy behavior.

I was going nuts: “Why are they taking so long?” I had no right to complain. Shooting my scenes wasn’t any harder than what the kids had to do. And they were kids. My acting on that show was like playing Twister: “Left. Red. Good, Bob, now move to the kitchen door.”

But whatever, what happened, happened. Not proud of it—and shouldn’t share it. So here it comes . . . I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed Dave and John and we went into the prop room backstage and locked the door. I believe the same prop room they used on
Friends
years later, when they inherited our stage, but I doubt they ever did this . . . Well, not as a group.

Prop room door double-bolted, I swung open the refrigerator, and behold! Six cans of whipped cream. Reddi-wip. Yes, that’s how it’s spelled. Nitrous oxide is dangerous. Can cause brain damage. But not in Reddi-wip. There’s not enough in there to make a woodpecker fart. Reddi-wip is still my favorite dessert topping. I hope that gets me clearance to mention it.

I think when I tried nitrous oxide once maybe in 1980, in a different form, known as whippits, it gave me an actual buzz. Which is what gave me the lame impetus years later to suggest this act of foolishness. Dave and John followed my lead and we inhaled the little bit of air still left in the cans that were meant for Michelle’s birthday cake scene. I guess we got high, don’t think so though. It was hard to tell, ’cause we were in a hurry and whipped cream started squirting out quickly.

I was an idiot. Oh my God, what a good caption for my next T-shirt. We were laughing, paranoid to be doing something so dumb. And for those of you thinking you want to try this—it doesn’t work. It’s stupid. And you don’t even get high; you just end up looking like someone had recently pleasured your mouth. And if done to ridiculous excess it can maybe cause irreparable brain damage. So can pleasuring someone’s mouth, if they have an infection they haven’t told you about and it spreads like a flesh eating virus.

We cleaned up; left the cans as they were, now sans the tiny jolt of nitrous oxide that once propelled their cream; and exited the room—not a moment too soon either, as we were needed on set for the birthday cake scene. We got out there, a little dazed but present. The prop people were trying to prep the cake with extra whipped cream for the bit that was about to take place, but as you’d guess, nothing came out of any of the cans.

The producers were a bit annoyed. You think? Here we were trying to shoot the scene and no whipped cream to be spewed. Our prop people were tops, so they futzed with it and it looked fine. If I do recall at all, one of the prop men, I believe “Property Bob,” visited another nearby set and brought back a couple tubs of Cool Whip: the topping that required no nitrous oxide. Less slapstick—less cream to be dispensed.

People ask, so here’s the other thing I should not have done while working on that show . . . They gave me a rubber doll to talk to as a stand-in for camera run-throughs to represent the character of Michelle. Maybe you can finish this story for me please.

Ashley and Mary-Kate were in school, so I had to camera-rehearse without any other characters and just the technical crew, with this four-foot-tall rubber doll. Only adults were there. A lot of crew guys whom I liked to make laugh. What could have happened next? Oh yeah, so I’m throwing it around, pretending to do stuff to it, as one would do if there were no child actors within a couple soundstages’ distance and you were a comedian with no moral compass in front of a crowd of people . . . and what I didn’t know was the television monitors were turned on in the schoolroom and all the dressing rooms, and in certain offices on the studio lot. Like I said, I was an idiot. Catchphrase!!!

Jodie’s mom, Janice, and Candace’s mom, Barbara, two very sweet people and great mothers, came down to the stage and said, “Bob, we can see what you’re doing on the monitors upstairs!” Jokingly as I could, I said, “Well turn them off, I’m
working
down here!” As usual, they were right. I should have used some part of my rational mind, my parenting mind. But I wanted to make the crew laugh. I wanted to make everyone laugh in a way I wasn’t able to do on the show.

What I learned through that experience is, if you’re making only a few crew people laugh and you’re playing with a life-size doll, and there are no other actors around,
stop it
—take a moment to yourself . . . and call a good therapist.

But all in all, it was a huge amount of fun working on that sitcom for eight years. I appreciate it a lot more now than I did back then. Recently I went back to the Warner Bros. lot to shoot a TV show, and as the golf cart was taking me from stage to stage, I was reminded how different things were when we shot
Full House
on Stage 24.

Security wasn’t tough back in 1994 because the world itself was in a different place. One time during lunch, I had the kids from the show in a golf cart and I drove right off the lot onto the sidewalk, out in front of the studios on Olive Avenue in Burbank, and started tooling down the street.

That’s pretty much the whole story. We didn’t rob a liquor store or anything noteworthy, but that was my way of doing something a bit rebellious and off-road that broke the day up for the kids. To sell books, I should probably add that we ran over a couple security guards in front of the main gate, but it just didn’t happen.

Truth is, behind the scenes it was often as sweet and gooey family-wise as it was on the air. Yes, I said and did things that were somewhere in between where I am today with my twisted sense of humor and where I was then with the show. But when all is said and done, it was just Dave, John, and me screwing around, sometimes saying irreverent things, as subliminally as possible, around incredibly talented young people, just to make the work seem more fun. It was a time of silly subliminal immature humor.

Since then, Ashley has told me that she and her sister knew when everyone was laughing at something inappropriate, but they just didn’t know what it was. None of the kids did. Until they got older. Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention . . .

It’s a gift to make children laugh. But for me it’s even more fun to make them laugh once they’ve grown up. Since the show went off the air I’ve spent the twenty-plus years since hanging out with all my former cast members. Feels weird to write
cast members
—they are my lifelong friends.

In particular, all of them have been supportive of me personally over the years with the benefits I’ve done for the Scleroderma Research Foundation.

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