Actor and comedian Bob Saget, though known on the stage and among his friends for his raunchy humor, first became known to audiences on family-friendly programming. He starred as the widowed father of three girls on ABC’s “Full House” and then as host of the network’s “America’s Funniest Home Videos” clip show.
As Saget recalled to Jake Tapper in a July 2021 interview, the track of his career was unexpected.
“‘Full House’ was an accident,” he said. “I got fired on CBS and was asked to be in ‘Full House.'”
The sitcom, which starred Candace Cameron Bure, Jodie Sweetin and twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in one role, ran for eight seasons. It lived on in syndication with strong enough nostalgia surrounding it that Netflix picked up a spin-off in 2016, “Fuller House,” starring Bure but featuring frequent appearances from original stars, including Saget, Dave Coulier and John Stamos. It ran for five seasons, concluding in 2020.
“I’m close with all the kids. It doesn’t happen a lot in the world where you stay close with all the people,” Saget told Tapper. “We’re an unusual cast in that way that I have been able to remain close with everybody, because I don’t take eight years of my life lightly and then the other five or six years, six seasons.”
Following his first round of sitcom fame, Saget worked steadily in film and television roles but became known to a new generation of sitcom fans on CBS’s “How I Met Your Mother,” acting as narrator and the voice of future Ted Mosby. That show ran until 2014.
Throughout the years, Saget remained a fixture in stand-up comedy, releasing multiple specials over the years and taking his show on the road.
Saget’s reputation for reveling in a much edgier brand of comedy could be seen in movies like “The Aristocrats” — exploring the competition among comics to tell the filthiest version of the same joke — and his guest stint on HBO’s “Entourage” as a version of himself.
Asked by Esquire to define his humor in a 2013 interview, Saget explained, “I am basically just a nine-year-old boy that evolved.” Toward that end, Saget seemed to relish pushing back against his success in squeaky-clean shows, telling dirty jokes at ABC events to make the executives squirm.
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CNN’s Joe Sutton and Brian Lowry contributed to this story.