Bob Saget: A Many-Faceted Jewel

Bob Saget’s fanbase can be neatly divided into two parts: those who see him as squeaky-clean Danny Tanner, of television’s “Full House,” and those who know him best as that guy in “Half Baked” who “used to suck dick for coke.” Not content with just those two personas, however, Saget has recently embarked on two new careers: directing and game-show hosting.

Saget is the host of NBC’s “1 vs. 100,” a prime-time trivia competition in which contestants try to beat out a “mob” of 100 people to win money. “It’s kind of like ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ combined with that old show I used to love, ‘You Bet Your Life,’” Saget says, speaking in a telephone interview this week.

The show debuted in October 2006 with ratings rivaling fellow hit game-show “Deal or No Deal.” However, Saget makes sure potential audiences know the difference between his show and NBC’s other game show: “Well, we don’t have briefcases,” he says. “And I’m willing to full-frontally touch somebody.”

Upcoming episodes of the show will feature celebrity blogger Perez Hilton, Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings, and an as-yet-unnamed Harvard professor.

Saget has also been gaining attention recently for his straight-to-DVD spoof, “Farce of the Penguins.” The film is narrated by Samuel L. Jackson and features the vocal talents of a wildly diverse cast, including Dane Cook, Christina Applegate, Tracy Morgan, and most of the cast of “Full House.”

“A lot of my friends did cameos,” he says, “just to be part of the dirty penguin movie.”

Although Saget wrote most of the film’s dialogue, he says much of the narration is improvised, like when Jackson says, “It’s getting as cold as a welldigger’s asshole.” Could the phrase be the next “I have had it with these mother-fucking snakes on this mother-fucking plane”? Maybe not, but Saget hopes the film will appeal to a wide audience.

However, he knows his target demographic: “If you’re a 17-year-old boy and you laugh at poop jokes, I’m your man.”

“Farce of the Penguins” adds to a long list of recent raunchy career moves he’s made. “The irony of my life is that one second, I’m saying nasty stuff and the next, I turn into father mode,” he says.

Just as the Olsen Twins have separated themselves from their “Full House” days, Saget seems to have cultivated a persona distant from Danny Tanner and earned a cult following with his turns in “The Aristocrats” and “Entourage.”

“People ask me, ‘Is that what you’re like at home? Sitting around with women, smoking a bong?’ And I say, ‘No, no, no.’ Even when I was college-age, I wasn’t a partaker really, of any consequence,” he says.

“I have children and a girlfriend and an ex-wife and a mother, so I have hall monitors all around me all the time. I’m not doing anything too dangerous.”

Saget’s college-friendly image has included multiple university stand-up tours. In 2001, B.J. Novak ’01, of NBC’s “The Office,” and B.J. Averell ’02, the winner of last year’s “Amazing Race,” on CBS, hosted a show in Sanders Theatre in which they awarded Saget honorary membership to the Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine.

Of the event, Saget says, “I love Harvard. It was a very special night for me,” but gripes that Harvard (or perhaps, the Lampoon) did not have the money to pay for his flight to Cambridge.

In the future, Saget hopes to continue his diverse career with live-action movies and an hour-long stand-up special. “I just want to crack nasty jokes,” he says, “and nobody gets hurt.”

—Staff writer Sachi A. Ezura can be reached at sezura@fas.harvard.edu