Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian (5 page)

I am getting to a point with all of this. It’s just hidden somewhere, like a Golden Ticket. Look, a bad plastic surgeon can really fuck up your life. Then again, it’s really nice during awards season, as we call it out here in Los Angeles, to view an actress you haven’t seen for a while and say to your significant other in bed, “She looks so much better this year, doesn’t she?” and then they correct you: “That’s ’cause the swelling went down, honey.” (This comment pretty much includes everyone you could bash with exception of a true survivor, Mickey Rourke. When you look like that, you’re entitled to walk around carrying your get-out-of-jail-free card.)

But back in the day, with no plastic surgery, all you could do was change your name. So Saget was originally something like Zaget, Zogut, Zagget. Interestingly enough, I did have an uncle named Bill
Sage,
not Saget. A great man. And such a nice name, Sage. Rolls off the tongue. Not like Saget. Add the
T
and you’re in for it at school . . . Saget the Faggot, Sag-ass, Sag-nuts, Sag-balls—I’ve heard all the variables. As I got older I tried to make fun of my own name before other people did: “Sag-balls, don’t mind if I do . . .”

Man, this is a cleansing, purging experience. And so is this book. It’s fun to be able to release anything you want to say.

But back to names. I met the Zagat guy—of restaurant-guide fame—in an elevator in New York once. He didn’t say a word until I broke the silence with something not so clever: “You’re the Zagat guy, right? I’ve been told we are not related.” Then after a minute or so of staring at me blankly with no emotion, he said, “No, we are definitely not related.” I then asked if he could help me get restaurant reservations. Not my best move. He said, “No, I don’t do that.” He had a good presence though. Reminded me of the Community Chest guy in Monopoly, except no monocle. And much taller. And no mustache. Come to think of it, he was nothing like him.

I don’t know what I’d have called myself if I could’ve picked my own name. If you could name yourself anything you wanted to, would you make your life easier and change your name to one word like Prince, Madonna, and Bono did? The great thing about life is you can change your name at any time. Maybe I’ll release this book as Bob Mellencamp Saget. Or Jew-el. Or Bobby Gaga. Nah, I loved my dad so much I am proud to wear his last name, odd as it may be, like a banner. Displaying it completely nude across my chest with just the “Sash of Saget” creating a diagonal beauty pageant cover-up—from right nipple to left nut. This idea is so strong, I’m feeling a killer poster here to be sold at my concerts. It’s all about the merch.

That’s right, I’m proud to be the son of Ben and Dolly. My mother, Dolly, who is still around, is the matriarch of my family, being my mom and all. She is like a great snow owl in her late eighties . . . Love her. And everyone’s kids and grandkids love her. That’s my mama.

My early memories of Dolly are of her cooking family dinners for us when I was a kid. I wouldn’t want to eat the food she prepared and my dad would reprimand me with, “Do you know what this meal would cost in a restaurant?” One time I answered him: “No, but I’d love to find out. Please can we go out to eat?”

I remember those family dinners as being loud and boisterous. There wasn’t much room for conversation. There was a lot of love, but also a lot of fast talking and not much listening. Sounds like a lot of people’s homes, right? I guess it’s better than complete silence at the table. I’ve been over to people’s homes where that’s the case, and there’s no easiness at a table of awkwardness. Woody Allen broke the ice best in
Annie Hall
with his tension-defusing line: “Dynamite ham . . .”

If you’re reading this book, perhaps you’re of a similar demographic. Not necessarily Jewish, but let’s say your upbringing was that of an “outsider.” An observer. A survivor. Who grew up looking at their family, friends, the entire outside world, and wondering, What the fuck is wrong with me? Wait, is it me, or is it
them
? Odds are it’s both.

In my life, and in my family, growing up could have been defined as “survival of the wittiest.” I certainly wasn’t the biggest jock. Because my dad was flattened out by his health issues during my childhood, he never played ball with me. I could kick ass at Keep Away and Red Rover, but that was about it.

Here’s a pleasant flashback: Got into my first fistfight just at the end of sixth grade at Larrymore Elementary School in Norfolk. A kid who’d bullied me all year finally outdid himself with his anti-Semitic remarks, and so one day I accepted his offer of a “fair” fight on the baseball field behind the school. I wasn’t exactly street-smart. Or cool. Or a fighter. Twenty kids gathered around to cheer us on. I was thrown because Buzzy, a guy who I’d thought was a friend of mine, rooted for that bastard I was fighting instead of me. After a bunch of bitch-slapping on my part, the shorter bully kicked me in the balls and my nose started to bleed profusely, which effectively ended the fight.

That night at home I asked my dad, “How come I got kicked in the balls and it was my nose that started to bleed?” He took his time to explain to me that “it’s just one long connected muscle.” I responded by asking him, “If that’s the case, if I keep pushing on my nose, will my penis pop out more so I can be happier for the rest of my life?” My dad smiled. He basically raised me to believe I would grow from this experience, not my mojo, but my understanding of how to outthink your bully. “Young grasshopper, better to think ahead of kick-to-balls so nose does not bleed.”

I didn’t go to prom. I didn’t have many friends. Throughout high school I didn’t do drugs. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have many friends. But the few I had, I treasured. And you could count them on one hand, if you were missing a thumb. There were only a few of them—so I’m going to name them and give their cell numbers.
No.
No point in that. Who needs the lawsuits?

I did have a girlfriend at seventeen whom I ended up getting married to. And we had three amazing daughters. Then we got divorced. Please hold your applause till the end of this paragraph. Those statements are true. And I know them to be true because I Googled myself to write all this.

I also just looked myself up on Wikipedia and was relieved to see it no longer refers to my mom and dad, Dolly and Ben, as Minnie and Lenny. But it also says my “friends used to call me Sags.” That isn’t true. Dennis Miller started to call me Sags years after we’d first met when he was starting out in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. And once someone says on TV that that’s your nickname, it becomes rote. I
wish
people had called me Sags growing up. I would’ve been way wannabe cooler with that nickname. But nope, for me it was Saget the Faggot. When guys called me that it hurt my feelings so much that to get back at them, I would blow them. No, I did not just type that, and no, you are not reading that in print. One-fourth of this book would have made my English teachers very proud.

I had one miraculous teacher who helped change the entire direction of my life. My senior English teacher in Abington, Pennsylvania, which is outside of Philly—her name was Elaine Zimmerman. A few years after she taught me, she was in a fatal car accident. I owe a lot to her. I was about to go to college, had enrolled in premed classes, and Mrs. Zimmerman literally told me, “Do not become a doctor. You need to make movies and perform and write. You need to make people laugh.” I took her advice, changed my major at Temple University from premed to documentary filmmaking, and started performing as a stand-up comedian. I can only imagine, if I hadn’t listened to her, how many patients I would’ve endangered. She saved thousands of lives.

And she was right. I needed to do something to make people laugh. Even in my youth. Although moving around so much was difficult, I was still a pretty carefree kid, showing off and getting silly-wild publicly whenever I could, even though lots of friends and relatives begged my parents to “ask Bobby to stop performing.” I’d whip out the guitar, play up to forty serious songs I’d written, and then tell as many toilet-centered jokes as I could conjure up. The only good thing about it was fewer and fewer relatives came to visit because I’d scared them off.

My career in comedy was a direct result of being the kid in class who was screaming out for attention. Not like Sam Kinison yelling out—I was too well-mannered to scream out my frustrations. Sam was one of my favorites, though. We met in Houston and he was impossible not to take notice of. I helped tee up his first showcase at the Comedy Store and we were on
The 9th Annual HBO Young Comedians Special
together, along with Louie Anderson, Bob Nelson, and Yakov Smirnoff. What a country. It was the first
Young Comedians Special
Rodney Dangerfield hosted.

People still ask me if I was a navy brat because I moved so much. I was born in Philadelphia, moved to Norfolk, Virginia, and lived there till I was fourteen, then moved to Encino, California, to learn about materialism, and then moved back to Philly at seventeen, just for my senior year, graduating from Abington. What you have just read is why I often got bad grades in English. I only had one teacher who gave extra credit for run-on sentences.

And as I’ve expounded on, I wasn’t a navy brat, I was a meat brat. The son of a meathead. A brat-wurst. It wasn’t easy relocating so much but I did okay. I ultimately got a girlfriend, but before that it was a struggle with the opposite sex. In ninth grade, when I lived in California, I wanted to take a girl to Disneyland. She was in tenth grade, a year older than me. I asked her if she’d like to go to “the Happiest Place on Earth.” A statement like that is almost a lockdown for not getting laid. Upon my invite, she said, “No, thank you.” It was also the first time I’d ever heard a girl say, “I like you as a friend.” Hearing that repeatedly throughout your life can be like an emotional circumcision. That’s a Rolling Stones song they left off their Chanukah album.

The Disneyland girl wasn’t my first crush. My first was when I was five and on the short bus to kindergarten. I was crazy for three girls, Denise, Jodie, and Beth. My libido hadn’t come in yet but I was semipopular because I was hyper and funny. Doesn’t always serve me now. What I have in common today with my five-year-old self is that I believe dry-humping to be considered sex. Wait, it still is, isn’t it?

Another big crush I had in prepuberty, besides every actress in a James Bond or Peter Sellers movie, was on my sixth-grade teacher in Norfolk, Mrs. Sherman. I was eleven. This kid named Buzzy was a guy I thought was my friend—but if you recall, he rooted for the bully in our big fight. Buzzy was more mature than any of us. He had pubes at nine. I had nine pubes at twelve.

Anyway, he had a crush on Mrs. Sherman as well, and to show his eleven-year-old love of her, he threw a pair of round-edged scissors at Mrs. Sherman’s chest. They hit her in the bra and literally bounced off her boobs and sprang back into the classroom. I was immediately in love and inspired. Yes, I was twenty years younger than her, but she was sexy and smart and controlled me. Similar to my last relationship. Silly me, still in sixth grade emotionally. Till this book comes out—then I’m plowing through seventh.

But before I end this chapter, there is another older woman I want to pay homage to if I may, a matriarch in my family. My bubbe. I’m concerned that in print this could come off like I’m trying to name-drop Michael Bublé. I’m talking here about my bubbe—my grandmother.
Bubbe
is Yiddish and means “a huge fan of Michael Bublé.”

I had two other wonderful grandparents too—my mother’s father, Lou, and his wife, Bella Comer. They were just fine, and I loved them and all that, but no one had the cute charisma of my dad’s mom, my bubbe.

Bubbe is pronounced “bubbee,” a befitting name for a woman who was short, prideful, smart, selfless, and a bit bubbly. She was born in Russia and was sent here by my grandfather once he paved the way to bring his family over to Philadelphia. My bubbe’s accent was a meld of Russian, Yiddish, English, and whatever language came from a town called Varclan, which doesn’t exist anymore. Too hard to spell, so the Cossacks leveled it.