‘Bob Saget: Zero To Sixty’: The ‘Fuller House’ Father Figure’s Latest Stand-Up Hour Skips Netflix

Even with all of its mighty algorithms, Netflix couldn’t find room in its house for a new Bob Saget comedy special.
Too bad. Because certainly all of the millennials currently watching Fuller House and rewatching Full House would love to see what Saget thinks about now at 61. His new hour of stand-up, Bob Saget: Zero to Sixty, is available just about everywhere else online except for Netflix, recorded earlier this year in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, before a packed crowd of hipsters who have grown up seeing his absurdist personality on TV and his sometimes downright dirty comedy onstage.
It’s the first such special by a famous comedian from Comedy Dynamics (producers of specials you’ve seen on Netflix, Showtime, Comedy Central and the already gone and forgotten Seeso, we hardly knew ye) to release wide for sale/rental first before hitting a single platform in an exclusive deal. Saget has reason to remain confident in Comedy Dynamics, as they produced his previous special and album, That’s What I’m Talkin’ About, which received a Grammy nomination.

Saget may not have fully matured past dick jokes. But he has evolved in recent years, to the point where he recognizes that the atmosphere and attitudes have changed, and that he should change with them.

After an early such dick joke, Saget reflects: “I’m on a plane, and I write down a joke to make people laugh, because the world’s so screwed up. I can’t watch the news. It’s upsetting me. I’d rather just talk about everything below my belt, and everything’s just fine.” The guy sitting next to him on that flight, however, might be confused by what he sees if he spies Saget’s notes. “He only knows that I was a dad on a show. and that f—ing show won’t go away.” Aside from mocking his longtime co-star and friend John Stamos, imagining them in sexual trysts, he’s not going to joke about Full House or Fuller House here.

Instead, he pivots into gratitude for his career and for his legacy, whatever and wherever you may remember him from best.

“I’m the only television father left that you can trust,” Saget jokes. While he still may share his naughty thoughts with us onstage, he leaves them there. Unlike Bill Cosby, who did the reverse. “When you watch an icon fall — I used to love his work, and it’s just strange, and he now claims that he is legally blind so that he cannot identify women who are saying that he molested them sexually.” Saget may decide to act out that scenario, blindly groping at his accusers. In real life, however, Saget says he has maintained a much more innocent profile. He illustrates that with a revealing story about a gig in the early 1980s in Cleveland, where the club owner had given Saget two quaaludes (Cosby’s pill of choice) and instructed the young comic to slip them in a waitress’s drink to have his way with her after the show. Saget apologizes for retelling the story but doesn’t have to apologize for how he chose to act in that moment.
At multiple times during the hour, Saget pauses to acknowledge how his audience of fans are perhaps too young to understand his premises or references, or quite identify to his stories, such as the time he obtained a bottle of outdated Viagra pills from the late Rodney Dangerfield. But Saget surely has fun interacting with his younger fans, and brings one of them onstage so he can offer some fatherly advice.

Saget acknowledges he feels like he’s stealing from the late great Don Rickles whenever he does crowd work, even if it’s just in spirit, but he also dedicates the hour to both Rickles and to the late Brad Grey, the former head of Paramount Pictures and Brillstein-Grey before that, whose very first client in the late 1970s was a college-aged Saget.
Back then, Saget would go on TV and talent contests performing song parodies on the guitar. And now, 40 years later, he’s closing his hour that way once again.
Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Where to stream Bob Saget: Zero to Sixty