That's not exactly the type of heartwarming anecdote one expects from the host of the sitcom's Wake Up San Francisco. But it gets worse. His all-time favorite episode? "The last one," Saget deadpans.
While Saget's recollections of his bygone days as the Tanner family patriarch (1987 to 1995) may be slowly tearing apart your childhood, they shouldn't be. Your pop-culture radar just needs fine tuning. Because while Saget served as the voice of reason behind the syrupy, morality-play music of lessons learned that wound down most Full House episodes, >he's dotted his career with enough off-color performances to let his true colors blaze through. Most recently, he appeared on an episode of Entourage, smoking a bong and hanging out with hookers, and his cameo appearance in the movie Half Baked has taken on near-legendary proportions. "Marijuana is not a drug," he yells out at a drug-addiction support group in that film. "I used to suck dick for coke. Now, that's an addiction. You ever suck some dick for marijuana?"
"Even when I did Full House and America's Funniest Home Videos, I had an hour HBO special, and I dropped the F-bomb throughout the whole thing," Saget explains. "What I had was an acting role, and I was lucky to have it, and it was family TV, and that's something that was also good. But I've always been like this, and all the comedians knew it. The only people who didn't know it were the people who only watched prime-time TV."
Evening television viewers, take note: Bob Saget is coming to town, and he's bringing the dick jokes with him. From Thursday, August 11, through Saturday, August 13, Saget will hit the Comedy Works to expound with as much vulgarity as he pleases on everything from the dating scene to parenting. (The show comes with a "mature content" warning label.) Fresh off a three-month stint performing as a stockbroker convicted of inside trading in the Broadway play Privilege (written by About a Boy co-adapter Paul Weitz), Saget is in full-blown performance mode and eager to share.
"I'm more engaged in my standup now than ever. There's so much I want to get done, so much that I want to tell the audience. That's why I can do so many shows in a row like I'm doing, because it's such a fix for me. It's the most fun I've ever had with my standup, and that just translates."
It translated so well at a recent sell-out performance at the University of Georgia that the school was able to sell 1,000 tickets for an impromptu second show in under two hours. A generation force-fed the pap of Full House has come full circle and is now enjoying the edgier second act of Papa Tanner.
"My phone's been ringing off the hook because I'm so R-rated," Saget jokes.
And there's some truth to that humor: He's been meeting with network executives, pitching a show about a character more like himself.
"It would have to be for cable, the kind of show I want to do," he muses.
Catch Saget and his potentially HBO-bound blue material this weekend. It sure beats the hell out of watching Full House reruns at home.