Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (26 page)

My dear pal Jeff Ross wrote a book called
I Only Roast the Ones I Love,
taken from the famed Friars Club motto “We Only Roast the Ones We Love.” That’s a nice motto, and a good idea in theory, and sometimes in practice, but I will tell you, sometimes it burns.

Jeff’s most quoted line about me in my roast was: “In honor of the late George Carlin, here are seven more words you can’t say on TV: ‘And the Emmy goes to Bob Saget.’ ” I heard that for the first time sitting in the roast chair. And I ain’t gonna lie—it stung. And it was one of the best lines of the night.

That’s what a Roast is. And Jeff’s great at it. And I told him after: I’m gonna spend my life proving you wrong. It’s a sweet and nasty little competitive group of alley cats I’m proud to be in. And I need it in my life to toughen my fruity little ass up.

So getting involved with the roasts not only made me learn how to take a hit, but it also made me so happy to follow in the footsteps—again, in my
own
mind—of my idols, like Dean Martin and Don Rickles.

And to have all my real comedy friends there, when I was being roasted, made it feel like family. The host was, of course, my brother John Stamos—I don’t know if I’ve made it clear in this book yet that Stamos and I are close friends. Maybe I should just include a pic of us having sex. Oh, wait, I have one, here . . .

So John agreed to be the roast master, and he shared with me the kind of jokes the writers of the roast were suggesting for him to say about me, all with the underlying tone of “Bob Saget is a huge asshole!”

John stood up for me: “I told them I wanted to say nice things about you. I couldn’t be mean to you like that, ’cause you’re a great guy and I love you.”

He had my back, and the intro was changed to: “Please welcome our guest of honor, the luckiest man and the worst entertainer in the history of show business. He’s a huge asshole and one of my best friends . . . Bob Saget!”

Roasts are like punching someone and then putting ice packs on them. And I was just fine with that on this occasion.

Greg Giraldo. An incredibly funny man with a big heart. When I was told I was being roasted, the one person I feared was Greg. A lot of my friends had agreed to do it, and I knew what to expect from them.

But Greg . . . I’d met Greg, but we weren’t “friends.” “Acquaintances,” a distinction my mom always made. His stand-up was really smart and cutting. And he was so great at the modern-day roast. A bull charging into the ring. I was in for it.

I winced throughout the following: “Seriously, who gives a shit about Bob Saget? With your long neck, pointy beak, and granny glasses, you’re like the Vlasic pickle stork.”

It was hard to listen to but I loved every minute of it. After the roast, I decided I wanted to get to know Greg better and become friends with him. So I called him one night. He was at the Improv in L.A., and he answered his phone and said, “Bob, I’m standing next to a girl from Romania who wants to talk to you.”

He handed her the phone and I spoke to a girl who spoke Russian-English. She told me her family was from Transylvania. I started to ask her questions about Dracula and lost her attention quickly, as she barely spoke English. Greg kept feeding her lines, trying to get her to ask me questions about
Full House
.

She didn’t know what he was talking about. I heard him laughing in the background, relishing that she knew nothing of the show and had no idea who I was. He made her say to me, repeating after him, “I have no idea who you are.” Then he grabbed the phone back, laughing at the “cellular roasting” he had just accomplished. We said we’d talk again soon and maybe go out to lunch sometime. He died about a month later. Like with George Carlin, I think he wanted to avoid lunch with me that badly. Rest in peace, Greg Giraldo.

As the taping went on, I was able to sit back and even started to enjoy myself for the couple hours it took to complete shooting it. It helped that most of the people doing the roasting were my friends. Norm MacDonald. He is one of the funniest people I have ever known. Norm and I spoke a couple days before the roast. He said, “Saget, I can’t roast my friends. I hate that kind of humor.” He told me he was going to tell old jokes from a roaster’s joke book from the 1940s.

I said, “Norm, I don’t know, that’s a funny choice, but if it’s not going well maybe you should just arbitrarily curse.” I told him how I was once at a charity roast at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the comedian and Oscar-winning actor Red Buttons, who was great at roasts and a lovely man, was in the middle of telling some jokes and hadn’t cursed for a while. After a couple minutes, he said, “And in case you missed it . . . 
FUCK!!”
Red Buttons. Loved him.

Norm listened intently. He didn’t really, I just thought that was a book-smart thing of me to say, and I know he’s going to read this. He listened to me with great intent. No, that’s not true either. He intended to listen to me.

Anyway, he politely declined my suggestion that he arbitrarily curse. He didn’t want to do what everybody else did and just tell filthy jokes. What ended up happening with Norm’s bit in the roast actually became a comedic point of contention for people who care about these things. He made me laugh the hardest, because the man works with no net.

Norm committed to the choice of telling old jokes from the 1940s joke book. Some of the audience was puzzled. But to me and to a lot of people, it was hilarious. I just watched and laughed throughout. Wasn’t too hard to figure out. Someone wrote about Norm’s performance that it was “some of the best anti-comedy ever heard.”

Norm wrote the jokes down on individual cards and committed to telling them. “Bob, you have a lot of well-wishers here tonight. And a lot of them would like to throw you
down
one . . . A well . . . They wanna murder you in a
well
. Seems a little harsh, but . . . Apparently they want to
murder you in a well
. It says here on this card.”

Then . . . “Bob has a beautiful face. Like a flower. Yeah, a cauliflower. No offense . . . but your face . . . Looks . . . like a collie-flower.”

Then slightly later . . . “I hear you have hair on your chest, Bob, and uh . . . Well, lemme tell you something . . . That isn’t your only resemblance to Rin Tin Tin . . . 
You’re a fuckin’ dog face!”

A few other memorable moments came from my friend Gilbert Gottfried, who said: “I watched Bob’s last HBO special in hi-def. Because in order to enjoy it, you have to be either high or deaf.”

And then there was the incredible Cloris Leachman, who said the line that traveled “virally”—which, as she conveyed, never used to mean anything in her time of acting and actually “doing the work” . . . The line was: “I’m not here to roast Bob Saget; I’m here to fuck John Stamos.”

Then she followed with: “I’m an Academy Award winner. For the love of God, will someone punch me in the face so I can see some stars?!”

The only thing that made me uncomfortable that night was the amount of jokes about my friends Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen. I have a big personal stake in my relationship with those two ladies. I love them and didn’t really want them to be subjected to what ended up being a hazing beyond my naïve expectations. But what the fuck am I talking about, because they’re smart and expected it.

Part me of felt bad and part of me knew that comedy comes first, famous people come second, and if you’re getting roasted, you have to try not to be a pussy. Also the writers and producers had made it clear early on that there were no prisoners to be taken. Producers take prisoners all the time. They’re called writers.

The final story I want to share from the roast is a dramatic one that put a very gloomy haze over the whole day of shooting. It’s about my friend—damn, I use that term a lot, but what the fuck, I am blessed and have a lot of friends . . . It’s about my friend Artie Lange.

Artie, who costarred with Norm in
Dirty Work,
was all set to fly to L.A. the day before the roast. He had been going through a rough time. We shot the roast late on a Sunday afternoon. That morning at nine-thirty I got a call from the producer, Joel Gallen, telling me that Artie had overdosed the night before. I said, “Oh my God, is he okay?”

Joel told me he thought so . . . and they were trying to get Artie on a private jet with a nurse to make it to Los Angeles on time for the taping.

Shortly after, I got another call from Joel, who said Artie
wasn’t
going to make it out—he was going to be okay but we still needed to get someone to fill his spot. There was one dilemma . . . All the jokes that had been written for Artie were “big man” jokes—or as we say in the trade, “fat jokes.”

I put on my producer head, which by definition means having no soul while you’re in work mode, and asked, “Who do we get?”

Joel said, “It’s Ralphie May or Steve Schirripa . . . or . . . who else . . . ?”

I recall saying something like, “This is terrible, Artie’s sick and we’re casting. This is a horrible business. Who do we replace him with?”

I called my buddy who came to be the backbone of the roasts on Comedy Central, Jeff Ross. I remember the conversation crystal clear-ish: “I just talked to Joel. Artie OD’d last night. We have to figure out who can take his place.”

Without missing a beat Jeff responded (and he later confirmed to me that he was “part serious”), “Oh my God! What am I gonna do? I got ten minutes of fat jokes!”

It was his knee-jerk reaction to respond to tragedy with a joke. And I embellish it here for comedic purposes. We were both really upset about Artie. We fucking love him.

Then we talked it out and actually had to deal with the fact that we were both getting picked up in three hours to go to Warner Bros. to rehearse for the roast. There was only one thing to decide upon. I called Joel back and said the two words we both instantaneously agreed upon to get through this difficult moment . . . Jeff Garlin.

It was another case of “size matters.” I’d known Garlin for twenty-plus years but we weren’t really close. That changed the moment he did the roast. On the air he reminded me of something I’d said to him at the L.A. Improv the night we met. He said, “I’ve always liked you. I remember when we first met you asked me if I knew how dry my grandma’s vagina was.”

I must’ve said it. He has a razor-sharp memory. He and I have been good friends ever since the roast. He’s a funny, complex and loving human being.

Comedy is a complex thing. They’ve always said, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” I guess it depends on how you die and how funny you were.

Chapter 11

RELATIONSHIPS I’D RATHER NOT TALK ABOUT

The length of this chapter is dictated by the number of lawyers involved with this manuscript. I am not one to name names, much to the dismay of a large sector of our culture. I
am
of course a rehabilitating name-dropper, a condition I don’t think there is a cure for. But to talk about lascivious things I’ve done and name the people involved is not morally something I am capable of.

I’ll do my best though. I’m sure someone will say, “Bob, please tell that story where we got all fucked-up in Vegas and we were in that suite together and that one dancer wound up in your room and another dancer wound up in my room.”

Sorry, Stamos, I’m not telling it! One of those girls owns a pet store she needs to protect, as well as her relationship with her boyfriend—so no, those kinds of stories are not going to be in this chapter! Oh wait—shit, what did I just do!? Truth be told, in the end “nothing happened,” as guys in tenth grade say. Although it’s possible Stamos shot B-roll that night.

But alas, as I near the end of this book, I am not currently in a romantic relationship. At this point in time, all of the significant and meaningful relationships I have been in have met their endings. And endings are as important as beginnings. I had to put a few of them down—or they had to put
me
down, which is why I put
them
down. People can be so petulant sometimes.

I have nothing negative to say about any relationship I have ever been in. Unless you’ve got a couple hours.

One thing we all share in life is that relationships are tough. Even if you’re fortunate enough to be in a wonderful, long-lasting relationship, you know that it can be hard work at times. It amazes me that anyone is able to last more than two and a half years together. The famous term is
the seven-year itch
. I went out with a girl once and I ended up with a four-day itch. During a first date is not a bad time to mention that you’re a carrier of some kind.

If you want a relationship to have any chance of lasting, you have to be really honest with your partner and tell them what you want. “What you really really want. I wanna, I wanna, I wanna.” You have to be able to Spice Girls up your relationship. I’m not suggesting ever bringing a third party into your bedroom. I’m suggesting bringing an all-girl band from the nineties into your bedroom.

“If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends.” The writing was right there on the wall in those lyrics. Nothing to decode.