Sympathy for the Philly Jew

Review: “Bob Saget: That Aint Right“For those unawares, Bob Saget was a nice Jewish boy just like myself at one point. In fact, he grew up in the same gen­eral area as me, and was even mar­ried at Beth Sholom, a syn­a­gogue near my home­town which was famously designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.There was much promise for the young Mr. Saget, who won a Student Academy Award for his doc­u­men­tary “Through Adam’s Eyes”, made while he attended Temple University, my Alma Mater. The film appar­ently dealt with his nephew’s expe­ri­ence with surgery. Knowing first­hand the his­tory of Temple’s film pro­gram, this would make him one of the first classes of the restruc­tured film pro­gram there, with an empha­sis on the ver­tié styled doc.A decade later, he found him­self, pos­si­bly awk­wardly, rep­re­sent­ing the father of a nation on ABC’s “Full House”. And from that lucra­tive gig he found him­self tak­ing up the reigns on a show that would prove to be the most impor­tant for­mula for web con­tent another decade later, “America’s Funniest Home Video” (which begat YouTube). Of course, it must have been a whirl­wind through the roar­ing nineties, hav­ing shown so much promise as a doc­u­men­tar­ian in that form’s orig­i­nal hey­day, then find­ing one­self stuck in the sink­hole of prime­time formula. So now he makes another for­ray into media, try­ing to win over sudi­ences as a stand-up comic. What’s fas­ci­nat­ing about this oddly enter­tain­ing spe­cial is that it’s his lack of recog­ni­tion that makes him such a won­der­ful screen character.

Ultimately, we laugh at Danny Tanner’s dirty mouth more than any­thing. Which is odd.After all, he’s not a crotch­ety old man a la Rhatt Fox. By our stan­dards, he should be given free reign to be as dirty as he wants to be, but build upon that with decent jokes and clever punch­lines. In lieu of any such thing, Mr. Saget has dis­cov­ered that he has lost an audi­ence of his peers, and is left with an audi­ence of “Full House” fans, peo­ple who grew up with him as a tele­vised father fig­ure. He banks on this like it’s nobody’s busi­ness. Profusely.As a stand-up act, this one fails mis­er­ably. He doesn’t really tell any jokes, rather than offer him­self up as a sac­ri­fice on the altar of sit­com memo­riam. He knows his place and does a won­der­ful job of con­vinc­ing us he doesn’t.I did laugh hys­ter­i­cally when­ever he men­tioned Dave Coulier, or when he brought out his gui­tar to sing some dirty songs. But maybe it was just because I recall how embar­rass­ing it was when he tried to teach D.J. Tanner gui­tar because Uncle Jesse was out find­ing him­self on that episode. Who cares. This is like watch­ing Rodney Dangerfield try to change his act up a bit, or Henny Youngman try­ing to pull off some Chris Rock bits. Check it out and laugh your 90’s ass of, or not.