Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (10 page)

I did what you do to work at being a stand-up—getting any stage time I could and playing nonpaying gigs in L.A. while also getting sets at the Improv, thanks to Budd Friedman, to hone my skills and build my reputation—and then began my journey to start working on the road.

I had a strong closer with my Shetland guitar. My big finish for several years was playing George Harrison’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” while turning a valve on a shampoo bottle filled with water, hidden behind the pegs, electric-taped to a garden hose with holes cut throughout its length.

As I sang the most civilian version of the epic song imaginable, water poured through the holes in the garden hose and my pants ended up drenched at the end. I would look at the audience, pants soaking wet, and say to a guy in the front, “My pants are wet, and it’s your fault.” That’s right, a musical prop bit ending with wetting
someone else
’s pants—I’d sunk as low as a kid with a dream could sink. Of course it was a real audience pleaser.

Except in giant venues. I got a few bigger gigs, like in Tahoe at Harrah’s opening for the great Kenny Loggins, and the audience could barely see the water cascading from my guitar. Even with backlighting, it wasn’t very visible. The other dilemma was the floor was soaked, and one time in true newbie fashion, I grabbed the mic stand after the song to say goodnight and got an electric shock because I was standing in the puddle I’d created. I retired that closing bit a couple years later after playing some smaller clubs with carpeted stages.

To give you an idea of how crappy a road gig can be when you’re just starting out, here’s a sordid tale of one of my first. It was a club in Anchorage, Alaska, that was actually a strip club, but comics got to go on in between the strippers. I went there, at the suggestion of Jay Leno, with Kevin Nealon and another comedian who I know would like to remain nameless. Kevin and I visited all the tourist sites of Alaska—we were like two men on a honeymoon—while the other comic stayed in the trailer with the strippers. He may have made the right decision.

Apparently, it was not a criminal offense to possess pot and guns at that time in Alaska, so the audiences were two things a lot of Americans to this day enjoy being: stoned and armed. There was a stripper with pie pans on her breasts and one over her groinal area. She danced around, lit matches taped to her pie pans, blew them all out, then announced, “And now, please welcome the comedy of Bob Saget!” I came onstage to the smells of sulfur and stripper sweat, and proceeded to talk to the audience about my relationship with my girlfriend. I thought I heard a gun being cocked, but in retrospect it may have just been the sound of my shitting myself.

Things didn’t get much easier as I tried to move forward in the comedy world. I toured with the Comedy Store College Tour, which meant I played a lot of lunch cafeterias with two other comedians, Jeff DeHart and Fred Raker. I was also fortunate to become the audience warm-up comedian for the sitcom
Bosom Buddies,
as I’d become friends with the producer and writer, Chris Thompson. Even got to appear on the show once as “Bob the Comic,” as I was dubbed by Tom Hanks, since the writers had made me the generic young comic with no name.

By this point it was the early eighties and I lived in a single apartment in Palms. That is, until that fateful day when a shotgun was found in the pool. I decided to move out—just didn’t feel like a safe place to live anymore. Made that decision without the help of counsel. I was in my early twenties, young and lost. Those two things often go together.

I’d met my future managers in Buffalo while on the college tour and decided to sign with them—they liked me. They thought I was funny. And yet I still trusted them. They were successful in the live music business, so it made sense to me. I was twenty-one, living in L.A., and they were in Buffalo, New York—Brad Grey and Harvey Weinstein. Back then, they were not very well-known. Today, they are very well-known.

Even though the early eighties and the comedy scene were sometimes a blur of drugs and booze, I remember everything and everyone from those early struggling comic days. But one person who stands out most is Rodney Dangerfield. I met him in 1980 when I was in La Jolla for the weekend doing stand-up at the Comedy Store. I’d just gotten offstage and Rodney walked in with two women on his arms. He came up to me and said, “You’re funny, man. I saw you on
Merv Griffin
.” I was pretty excited and my ego was starting to engorge, when he proceeded to sum me up in a couple sentences: “You got a funny Jew head, man—you’re fucked—your mind is always going. Better to be born rich, dumb, and Catholic.” (Or words to that effect.)

Then he went on to tell me he’d tried to go to La Costa, a health spa resort near San Diego, to clean out. He’d only lasted there for one day. “I can’t do it, man,” he said. “No booze, no coke, no pot, no pills.” He kept repeating that as a mantra of sorts. Funny as hell.

I was excited to meet this man who’d made me laugh for years, an icon, and one whose whole image and attitude was that of an outcast. I think that’s why I and so many other people could relate to Rodney and his true feeling of a lack of “respect.” He was always encouraging to me. He was encouraging to a lot of other young comics as well. And he never touched me.

It was that year, 1980, that Rodney exploded into the comedy film world with
Caddyshack
. He was fifty-nine when the movie came out. Fifty-nine. I’ll say that once more with feeling. Fifty-nine. That’s how long he did stand-up and struggled to get his name known, before his first successful movie.

I am majorly inspired by Rodney’s timeline. From being born Jacob Cohen in 1921 to getting “no respect” his whole life, and then rising to worldwide recognition just before he turned sixty . . . no wonder he felt tortured. I got to know him well. Perhaps too well. He was a complex man, but an incredibly funny man, and he loved young comedians more than almost anyone. He identified with their struggle.

In 1980, when I first met him at the club, I ended up hanging out that whole weekend with him. I remember he wore linen pants and a shirt held together by only two buttons. That was his outfit, and he wore that as much as he wore his work uniform: the signature black suit, white shirt, and red tie.

I stayed friends with him for many years, until the end of his life. Officiated his funeral. A funeral where the pallbearers were me, Rodney’s son Brian, his son-in-law David, producer David Permut, comedian Harry Basil, Jim Carrey, Michael Bolton, Rob Schneider, and Adam Sandler. I was honored to officiate. It’s something I was unfortunately experienced at handling. I had been asked to officiate by his wife, Joan, and I wanted to be there for his children, Melanie and Brian.

After all the stuff my family had been through, a lot of my friends over the years knew I was pretty good at dealing with death, that I could make people laugh even at the most difficult times. Not necessarily something I’d want to boast about: “Man, my grandmother’s funeral was hilarious! And the deli was delicious!” But as Rodney always said, “It is what it is.” If I can help others laugh and ease their pain at a traumatic time in their lives, it is an honor.

By the way, what is it with Jewish people—of which I am one—and deli food at the most emotional moments? Deli at a funeral, deli at a circumcision . . . I still can’t get over the image of my cousin’s baby having his penis clipped in front of a hundred people, and then someone coming in with a deli plate with pounds of tongue majorly featured. On the very same spot: penis and tongue. Go together like hand and glove. If the glove had one finger.

But let me get back to Rodney for a moment. It’s not fair for me to just open with “This is how I met him” and then “He was buried.” He had a style all his own. He was competitive: he wanted to have the funniest jokes that ever existed and lay them out in a way that sideswiped you because they were so hilarious and delivered in such a rapid-fire style that you were almost body-punched into laughing.

His style was also to make fun of himself. He would say things like, “I got no opening, I got no close, and I’m weak in the middle.” Not all comedians are meant to take this self-deprecating approach. But his philosophy was that you had to take shots at yourself before taking shots at anyone else. I could relate. I definitely had a bit of Rodney in me—again, not literally.

But he gave me a lot of advice. One of the most valuable things he ever said to me was: “Just go like a tank. Just go straight ahead and keep goin’. They wanna stop you. Nobody wants to help you. Just go forward . . . like a tank.” I say that same metaphor to younger comedians today when they ask me for advice.

Rodney was very helpful to young comedians, and it was largely because he’d gone through so many hard times himself. As I mentioned before, he hosted
The Ninth Annual Young Comedians Special,
where I appeared with many “beginning” comedians, including Sam Kinison, whom I’d met in Houston while doing stand-up. That was just after the time Sam had chained himself to a telephone pole in front of a comedy club and appeared in the
Houston Chronicle
wearing a crown of thorns and a diaper, saying the club had persecuted him like Jesus.

A few years later, Sam and I would occasionally hang out late into the night at the Comedy Store in L.A. I remember once the two of us were sitting at a table on Sunset Boulevard, Sam with a bottle of Jack, and he looked up at me and said, “Bob, do you ever get depressed?” I said, “Yeah, Sam.” He asked, “Do you drink when you’re depressed?” I said, “Yeah, sometimes.” He told me, “Next time you get depressed, you come see me.” I loved his comedy mind, but let’s just say he wouldn’t have been the first person I’d have gone to when I got depressed. And I got depressed a lot.

Drowning my sorrows in booze wasn’t my style. And I want to go on record that I’m anti-drugs, except the ones I take for cholesterol, anxiety, a sleep disorder, and tranquilizing animals.

I don’t smoke pot anymore. Used to in my early twenties. Hard to avoid it if you’re around comedians and musicians. And restaurant employees. And heart surgeons. I’m not much into it anymore, but I do think pot is overly criticized. Especially bad pot. The smell of bad pot is necessary. It helps you appreciate the smell of good pot.

Once when I was back in Philadelphia visiting my parents, I tried to get my dad to sneak away from my mom and smoke with me. Told him it would open up his mind. He didn’t do it. Mainly because he was afraid of the smoke that would go into his lungs. Since his heart attacks, he’d stopped smoking permanently many years earlier. Also he regarded marijuana as a drug that made you lose control of your mind. And he didn’t need that. His mind was already controlled. By my mother.

I didn’t even start smoking until I moved to Los Angeles in my twenties. Thinking about it now, it served its purpose for me. Especially while I was on the road and getting through the struggle that comes with what Lenny Bruce called “having twenty-three hours to kill” after that one hour onstage at night. Not the healthiest lifestyle choice.

Nor was cocaine, which I also tried in the early eighties but learned pretty quickly that it destroys all passages, whether they be nasal, heart, or life. And the real problem for a comedian on cocaine at two
A
.
M
., besides the triple-time heartbeats, is the loss of appetite.

Throughout the constant struggle and rejection I must say that fun times were had during those years—hanging out with comedians at every deli in L.A. or New York at two
A
.
M
., eating hot pastrami sandwiches. Some of those comedians, amazingly, are still alive. By morning, pink pastrami juice was sweating out of our pores. That shit can kill you. You know the old joke “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice”? For some comedians the goal was just getting to Carnegie Deli.

It’s funny the things I end up remembering most about those years. I guess defining moments for a struggling young comedian come in many forms. For some the motivation is just to get laid. That wasn’t really my motivation for most of my up-and-not-coming years because I had a girlfriend, whom I ended up getting married to. But for others, it was everything.

Getting laid and doing stand-up are inextricably linked. Even just the sight of a man or woman alone onstage can have a sexual element to it. There’s no way the audience can look at this one person up there for an hour or more and not end up checking them out. Even if the response is nausea. Some comedians today go way past being monologists by wearing the tightest jeans they can and gyrating like a Cirque du Soleil performer. You use whatever works for you.

There’s a school of newish (not usually Jewish) comedians today who are very physical. It’s almost like you’re watching them do martial arts while they’re telling jokes. It works for me if the story they’re telling is
about
martial arts, but otherwise, I am drawn toward comedians with more humanlike behavior. Anything that steals focus from the artist that’s not organic to what they’re saying makes it harder for me to connect.