You can go one of three ways for when you’ve as famous as Bob Saget is from such a low-key body of work. You can take the Drew Carey route: fade gently into obscurity with yet another low pressure, high-paycheck gig, limit your public appearances and thus put a nice damp mitten over the lightening pole for jokes — because warranted or no, you know they’re coming; it’s nearly an accepted consequence of obscene fame and wealth — about how old or washed up or unfunny you are. You can become a burnout, a public humiliation or a caricature of your former self — and I think I hardly need elaborate on who recently has chosen that path. Or, you can embrace the embarrassment and jump into the fray, maybe give yourself up for a roast, maybe cameo in “Entourage,” maybe sing a good-natured song about the persistent rumors of homosexuality that accrued behind your most famous character. Kudos to Saget for choosing the later.
Saget’s humor is best described as sophomoric. It’s the type of stuff that would probably fall with a thud at the foot of a less well-known figure, but the contrast between Saget’s onscreen character (both in “Full House” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos”) and his onstage persona provides a source of humor that’s completely subtextual. Not that Saget’s isn’t aware of that source; to the contrary, he milks it for all it’s worth. Well, he milks it for all it’s worth as long as that doesn’t include any joke about the Olsen Twins.
The act was split roughly into two distinct parts. In the first, Saget kept up an impressive rapid-fire repartee with the audience. He immediately singled out a few people in the crowd (one who he called Evan took the brunt of Saget’s wrath because of the hat he was wearing; I saw the guy outside later and it was an Angry Birds knit stocking cap, which, yeah, I guess you could pass judgement either way on that) and incorporated their names into profane rants questioning their sexual prowess, their state of inebriation or their general intelligence. Of course, that sort of aggression only served to fuel the fire of a crowd that had mixed motivations for plopping down the $30 ticket price. Heckling insued, but Saget mostly managed to keep the crowd’s shouts at bay by employing a mixture of responding to specific insults and talking over others. When he was finally egged into taking a sip of his beer (granted, it was an impromtu delivery by an extremely inebriated man in the middle of one of his jokes), Saget took a tiny sip, drawing still more cries of derision. But he saved the day by offering the rest up to a audience member in the front row, who — in classic Wisconsin fashion — managed to finish the beer and clear the air for Saget’s next joke in about five seconds. Saget appeaed somewhat floored by the display.
A second portion of the act was more musical in nature. Saget brought out the guitar and played such vulgarity-laden classics (okay, not classics) as “My Dog Licked My Balls” and the aforementioned “Danny Tanner was Not Gay.” This part of the act was much better recieved, and seemed more comfortable for the commedian as well, although he ocassionally slipped into singing, say, the theme from “Titanic,” as if just to fill the silence that could allow a derisive remark from the crowd. Still, the performance was handled professionally, if somewhat aloofly from the television star, and that was to be expected. In the same way one might begrudgingly respect a band that found artistic fulfillment long after they saw commercial success, Saget’s act is cognitively dissonant, but in good way. For a man worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $90 million (depending who you ask) performing for half a house in a college town, that’s probably about the best you could hope for.
