Bob Saget Played America’s Cleanest Dad and Told Its Dirtiest Joke

Bob Saget

Photo: Bernard Gotfryd / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 17, 1956 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	January 9, 2022 (65)
Occupation	Comedian and actor
Known for	Madagascar, Entourage, New York Minute
Awards	Academy Award

The joke is older than television and nearly impossible to tell well. A family walks into a talent agent’s office, describes an act of escalating obscenity, and announces the name of the act. In The Aristocrats, a documentary in which about a hundred comedians take their turn at it, one of the most notorious versions belongs to the man who had spent eight seasons as the tidiest father on American television. Bob Saget never saw a contradiction there. Audiences did, and for most of his career the gap between Danny Tanner, the widower who disinfected the kitchen in Full House, and the comic who could drain a club of its innocence in a single set was the first thing anyone wanted to talk about. It is also the thing his own last piece of work, reaching Netflix almost four years after his death, quietly answers.

Philadelphia is where Robert Lane Saget was born, into a Jewish family that moved with his father’s career. Benjamin Saget was a supermarket executive and his mother, Rosalyn, a hospital administrator, and the boy grew up between Norfolk, Virginia, the Encino neighbourhood of Los Angeles and the suburbs north of Philadelphia, finishing at Abington Senior High School. Early death ran through that family. His father had lost four siblings, and Saget would later write and speak openly about how much that loss shaped him.

He went to Temple University to make films, and he was good at it: a documentary short, Through Adam’s Eyes, won him a Student Academy Award. The stage, though, paid first. While still a student he was working the late slots at The Improv and Catch a Rising Star in New York, learning that the fastest way to win a tired room was to say the thing nobody else would. He graduated in 1978 and headed west.

The break came from the least likely direction for a comedian of his temperament. In Full House, which ran on ABC from 1987 to 1995, he played Danny Tanner, a San Francisco sportscaster raising three daughters after his wife’s death with help from his brother-in-law and his best friend, played by John Stamos and Dave Coulier. Two years in, ABC also gave him America’s Funniest Home Videos, and from 1989 to 1997 his job was to stand between clips of falling toddlers and groin-struck fathers and keep the puns coming. For several seasons he was on two ABC shows at once, playing two versions of the same reassuring man.

The act never went anywhere. He toured through the sitcom years and after them, and the material grew more deliberately unrepeatable. HBO aired That Ain’t Right, Comedy Central gave him its roast in 2008, and That’s What I’m Talkin’ About earned a Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album. He let Hollywood in on the joke too: an uncredited cameo as a cocaine addict in Half Baked, a debauched parody of himself across four episodes of Entourage, a four-month Broadway engagement as the Man in Chair in The Drowsy Chaperone. In 2014 he put the whole double life into the title of his memoir, Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian.

Directing was the ambition he carried longest. For Hope, an ABC television film from 1996, was inspired by his sister Gay, who had died of scleroderma three years earlier; from 2003 he sat on the board of the Scleroderma Research Foundation and raised money for it for the rest of his life. Two years later came Dirty Work, a revenge comedy built around Norm Macdonald that critics dismissed and audiences skipped, and which has since found the cult following that usually arrives too late to help. A penguin-documentary parody, Farce of the Penguins, and the small indie Benjamin followed, with Saget behind the camera and, in the latter, in front of it.

The usual story about him, the clean dad secretly rebelling through filth, gets the order wrong. The stand-up came first, years before Danny Tanner; the sitcom interrupted the comic, not the other way round. The less flattering truth sits elsewhere. The films he most wanted to make never found an audience, and his widest reach came through roles that hid him: hosting other people’s home videos, and lending his voice to the older Ted Mosby, the unseen narrator of How I Met Your Mother, for nine seasons from 2005 to 2014. Millions of viewers heard him every week without seeing his face. His most durable dramatic performance was a voice, and his most personal filmmaking stayed on the margins of a career the public measured by a sitcom.

The sitcom came back anyway. From 2016 to 2020 he returned as Danny Tanner in Fuller House on Netflix, older, still tidy, and clearly enjoying the reunion. He kept touring. On 8 January 2022 he played a show in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida; the next day he was found dead in his room at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lakes. He was 65. The medical examiner ruled that he had died of blunt head trauma, most likely from an accidental fall.

His first marriage, to Sherri Kramer, lasted from 1982 to 1997 and produced three daughters, Aubrey, Lara and Jennifer. In 2018 he married the television presenter Kelly Rizzo. After his death, donations to the scleroderma foundation he had championed poured in, his podcast Bob Saget’s Here for You released a last episode, and in June 2022 Netflix streamed Dirty Daddy: The Bob Saget Tribute, filmed at The Comedy Store with the friends who had shared his stages. His final acting role, as Lawrence in the dark family comedy Daniel’s Gotta Die, premiered at the Austin Film Festival that October.

The last credit took longer. Who Is Martin Mull?, which Saget co-directed with Neil Berkeley, began streaming on Netflix on 7 October 2026. It is a portrait of a musician, cult comedian, sitcom fixture and painter who died in 2024, told by Mull himself and by Steve Martin, Tom Waits and David Alan Grier, with Saget sitting across from his subject for the interview. Neither man lived to see it released. It is hard to miss what Saget chose to spend his final project on: a performer who changed shape every decade and was never asked to apologise for it. For a comedian who spent his career being asked which of his two selves was the real one, that choice reads as his answer.

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Tags: actors, comedians, How I Met Your Mother, Martin Mull, Who Is Martin Mull?, Bob Saget

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