Bob Saget
by Daniel Robert Epstein for SuicideGirls (http://suicidegirls.com/)

Since the two shows starring Bob Saget, Full House and America’s Funniest Home Videos, ended nearly ten years ago it has been a long hard road to make America realize that he is one of the sickest and funniest comedians around today. Certainly directing the cult classic Dirty Work and his brief appearance in Half Baked as the cocksucking cocaine addict helped that cause. But it was really his very dirty version of the aristocrats joke in the documentary The Aristocrats and his self parodying appearance on Entourage that has led to him directing the March of the Penguins parody, Farce of the Penguins.

Farce of the Penguins is a hysterically dirty and funny DVD original movie made up of stock footage of penguins with narration by Samuel L. Jackson. Voices of the penguins are done by Saget, Lewis Black, Tracy Morgan, Christina Applegate, John Stamos, Dave Coulier, Jodie Sweetin and many more.

Buy Farce of the Penguins

Daniel Robert Epstein: So this movie is almost as dirty as your standup.

Bob Saget: It’s so hard because they compete so heavily. I’m such a filthy bastard; I don’t know what to do. I have a feeling I will have to clean it up soon. Two years from now I’ll be all PG or something. The movie definitely has some dirty spots and we were a little dirtier in the earlier pass. I’m happy with it. It’s a movie, but a movie made out of stock footage.

DRE: I read that the footage is really old.

Bob: It is. Some of it is Beta, 16mm, 35mm and I think there’s 8mm footage in there. It is mostly older stuff because we couldn’t use anything from March of the Penguins or any current stuff from various nature documentaries. Sometimes, like a porn film, we repeat the same shots.

DRE: You did that a lot [laughs].

Bob: There are just so many head shots of penguins standing still. A lot of the documentarians shot this stuff from so far away. So when they get close, a lot of times it’s penguins that kill their young and weird shit that you just don’t want to show. Our movie is a lot less violent than March of the Penguins. In that a seagull kills a baby penguin. We don’t believe in that. We just believe they should have sex but not with children.

DRE: What’s funny is you went all Hitchcock for the penguin penis.

Bob: That’s no pun there either. That’s how he got his name actually. He did it all on camera. We have the deleted scenes with the CGI penis on the DVD.

DRE: It’s less funny once I saw the penis which I’m sure is why you took it out.

Bob: It is not funny; I hate to say on the nose, which is called tea bagging I believe. I’m sorry you can’t really print that.

DRE: I can. This is SuicideGirls, I can print everything.

Bob: That is so fucking awesome because we’re in that world right now. Think about it, years ago people could protect their careers.

But as for the penis, we really thought less is more because hearing the sound of it hit the snow and putting a dent in the white powder was a lot better than dropping a huge penis out of Tracy Morgan’s character’s body.

DRE: Would it still have been a black penis if it wasn’t Tracy playing him?

Bob: I think it would have been anyway. It wouldn’t have been Caucasian flesh colored. That was a real racist thing to say. If it had been Lewis Black’s character and a penis had dropped out, I can tell you that it would have been the same color. There is no racism when it comes to penises. I’m an equal opportunity penis supporter.

I feel fucked and it’s because I said the word Caucasian. That’s what I’m having pain over. Who the fuck says Caucasian penis unless you’re in a lineup and you got to pick one out of the five guys, “That’s the penis. I didn’t see his face, I only saw his penis.”

DRE: Since it is all old stock footage, most of these penguins are probably dead.

Bob: I don’t think that the earth opened up and swallowed a lot of them but I’ve been reading stuff. Some people say that penguins are on the verge of being extinct and we’re losing hundreds of thousands of them. Then another statistic says that there are ten to 12 million Chinstrap penguins and they are multiplying rapidly because a lot of their predators are being killed by fishermen. It is such a freaky, weird, horrible thing that fishermen are working at a pace to kill all the predators. I don’t know where you get those stats. If you fly overhead and you see a big mass of urine and shit, there’s probably a bunch of penguins in it.

DRE: But penguins are doing good in the movies.

Bob: I think the public is very infatuated with something that has survived. These little bastards are only a couple feet tall but they’re made of the thickest skinned shit.

DRE: No joke but I think the fact that penguins are so cute is why people love them.

Bob: They’re cute but I hear they’re vicious. Not that I’ve tried to have sex with one. But I hear that if you go up to one and try to mess with it, it will fuck you up. My editors, Michael Miller, Axel Hubert and I saw a lot of bad stuff. There are a lot of catastrophes that befall these guys. You can laugh at it for a second because we all laugh at sick stuff. I don’t enjoy watching penguin porn which there was a lot of. We were like, “I can’t watch this stuff.” There’s a lot of stuff that would have made it into March of the Penguins or Happy Feet. Happy Feet’s slogan was “Danger may cause toe tapping” and ours was “Danger may cause butt slapping” or ass raping which I’m against.

DRE: How could you figure out that certain footage would be good for the movie?

Bob: I watched a couple hours of a 30 year old penguin documentary. It had been shown on public television and wherever the hell, schools and stuff. It was similar in story to March of the Penguins. It’s the same thing. They walk west to east as they make the pilgrimage to the breeding ground. Then they mate with one person but they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. There are gay penguins and they stay together.

My point was that I wrote a script. I watched footage and I wrote the story arc that they’ve got to get to the breeding ground. Then once they get there it should be an orgy because that’s what really goes on. It is beautiful and graceful up until the point where one mounts the other from behind and they flap their wings. It’s quite amazing to look at. Not to sound all penguiny and fruity. Then there’s a lot of nasty crap going on because there’s pee and feces everywhere. If you’re going to be having sex in your own excrement you’re The Aristocrats.

DRE: Is this the closest we’re going to get to a Full House reunion?

Bob: This is pretty damn close, isn’t it? My favorite part of the thing for me was John Stamos and Dave Coulier playing the environmental penguins with me as I run up the hill and yell, “Where did all the fucking snow go?” I want to do an R rated Full House feature but I don’t think anybody else will allow it. I don’t think Warner Bros will hurt their franchise like that.

DRE: Maybe go for independent financing and call it Empty House.

Bob: Yeah right, or Full Mouth. The good part is that we really love each other, which is an unusual thing in the world of people that did sitcoms together.

DRE: Just to bring up something else from the past, this is funny footage with someone voicing over it. This could be America’s Funniest Home Videos all over again.

Bob: Yeah, that kind of what happened. I was sitting there watching March of the Penguins, I turned the sound down and went, “I’m freezing my nuts off.” There are a couple moments in it that I felt they used to do on America’s Funniest. The music montages they used to do like they would play Rock around the Clock and people will get hit with rocks for two minutes. The scenes when all the penguins go on a detour, they start screaming and stuff. Those were wild, AFHV moments.

DRE: You and Lewis [Black] are a great team in the movie, have you known each other forever?

Bob: We’ve done stand up together. I do these benefits for the Scleroderma Research Foundation. My sister passed away from that about 13 years ago. We’re doing a benefit on March 23 in San Francisco with Lily Tomlin and Dana Carvey. Lewis always does whatever favor he can do for anybody so he’s at those a lot. I just love him so he was the first person I thought of. Tracey Morgan is a friend of mine and is just hilariously insane and funny. Mo'Nique I had not worked with before but I love what she does. Christina Applegate wanted to do it because it was a dirty penguin movie. Samuel L. Jackson read the script and saw 20 minutes of stock footage, which I had voiced over.

DRE: You’ve said this film was really tough to make but was it easier in another way because you didn’t have to deal with actors very much.

Bob: Yeah, we did it like you would do a good looping session. But it was very similar to a garage version of an animated movie. They’ll lay down a scratch track on one of these great CGI movies. They don’t actually do the CGI work until they lock down the voices. This movie had to be formed quicker. So we went in, we did one version of it. I rewrote 45 minutes of it and then we just kept shaking the tree. I had this one editor that came in and said, “I’ve got some footage of a monkey banging a coconut. Do you want to see it?” I’m like, “Yeah.” So it got to the point where we were looking for other stuff because it’s very hard to look at the same penguin walking left to right. Stock footage was a bit prohibitive too, because it was expensive.

DRE: Do penguins ever actually put it in the wrong hole?

Bob: Penguins only have one hole. I call it a pooter/cooter.

DRE: That’s very William Burroughs.

Bob: That is exactly what it is.

It’s very difficult when the lynchpin of my movie is anal rape. He didn’t know you put it where you put it. Truth be known the movie is a ten minute joke at best and I’m very proud of it for whatever. The people I’ve shown it to love it but I don’t trust anybody. It is 80 minutes of a story that the movie’s made out of air.

DRE: Did you send a copy of it to the guy who made March of the Penguins?

Bob: [laughs] No, I don’t think I’m going to do that. When [producer] David Permut and I started this, I said to him, “I want to take March of the Penguins and take Morgan Freeman’s voice off it, narrate it with funny voices and make it R rated.” We met with the head of National Geographic Films and Warner Independent and they were very gracious, believe it or not. We had some real conversations about it but legally it just couldn’t be done. These French filmmakers are very protective of their amazing movie.

DRE: I read that your oldest daughter saw The Aristocrats.

Bob: Yeah, she just went to the theater and said, “Daddy I’m going to go look at it right now.” I said, “Please don’t.” It was too late.

DRE: How old is she?

Bob: She’s 19 and going to be 20 soon. I hate to say that on your website [laughs]. All three of my daughters have seen Farce of the Penguins. My 14 year is pretty savvy to comedians and adult humor. I didn’t show her the extra stuff but she did accidentally walk in while I was showing a deleted scene to someone. But she loved the movie.

DRE: When did your daughters first find out that you were one of the dirtiest people on earth?

Bob: When they were little kids. I guess Satan does it that way, he says it with a smile. I’ve always found gallows stuff really funny. So even when I began as a 17 year old standup my humor was about the wrong thing. But my daughters are so level headed, as of this interview. Anybody in my life who’s close to me looks at me with one eyebrow raised and then doesn’t judge me too bad because they know I’m just a nine year old boy with a filthy mouth.

DRE: So it really was like three days of work in 2005 that kicked off this Bob Saget resurgence.

Bob: I’d say two days and forty minutes. But honestly it’s been ten years of this. When those two well known family shows ended, I had been directing For Hope which was a TV movie about my sister. Then I did Dirty Work and then I did some other TV movie stuff. I had a sitcom called Raising Dad for all intents and purposes was like a dry heave of Full House, but a dry heave in a good way. [laughs] A dry heave with no chunks so you feel good about it.

DRE: Farce of The Penguins was great by the way. My wife didn’t want to watch it but I forced her and she loved it.

Bob: That is a giant compliment. I really appreciate that because I worked a year on this fucking thing. No matter what movie you’re making, even if you know it’s not good, it is still really hard work. I love this movie and to hear someone liked it and found it funny is a reward for me.

DRE: It’s going to become a cult classic for sure.

Bob: That’s fantastic. I’ve seen it on a big screen and it is very funny but some of the footage looks like ass projected. A line I used on The Tonight Show was, “It’ll be in theaters if you have a theater in your home.” But I do think it’s a stoner movie for the college kids.

DRE: I can’t remember when your last HBO special was.

Bob: A long time ago but I’m working on one now. We’re going to close the deal. I’m just figuring out the logistics of it now. It takes about a year to get enough material for a special.

DRE: HBO specials, including yours, used to be a half hour of films then the comedian did standup.

Bob: Yeah, I loved it when I did it but I know it didn’t work. There were a couple minutes in it that were really good. It wasn’t like, “Oh I’m doing two family shows. Fuck you, here’s my HBO special.” I dropped the F bomb a few times but I don’t have the same voice that I have now.

DRE: How many more people from The Aristocrats are going to get their own game show to host?

Bob: I know, that’s the big joke. I’ve been offered game shows forever and I’ve turned down a lot of money. Then for a couple I would have done, they didn’t want me. Then NBC came to me and said, “You can work your stuff in. You can’t go Aristocrats but you can say ass and nuts” and I have been.

DRE: Adam West was a guest on 1 vs. 100, did you get to hang out with him?

Bob: I did and I made him cry, which was really nice.

DRE: What’d you do to Adam West?

Bob: I held the Batcock, no I’m kidding. Actually, I met Adam West at an ABC thing 20 years ago. It was a really special night because Muhammad Ali was there as well. I’m in the bathroom and Adam West was there and as a joke I said, “You taking out the Batcock?” and he said, “It’s turbo charged.”

But I made him cry because when he was on the show I said, “It’s really great to have you here. I grew up watching your show.” He got teary eyed because he shot Batman on the stage where we shoot 1 vs. 100.

DRE: That’s cool, actually.

Bob: They also shot the scene from It’s a Wonderful Life, where Clarence tells him to make a decision and not jump off the bridge. They shot that on the stage where I shoot the show. It let’s you know where show business has gone. [laughs] It’s a Wonderful Life or do you want the mob?

DRE: So Dirty Work has become a cult classic.

Bob: I loved that movie. There’s an R rated version, which is the one that really kicked ass for us. The studio said “You got to make it PG-13.” So we took four minutes out of it and I think it really did a disservice to the movie.

DRE: Has it made enough money on DVD for a director’s cut?

Bob: I’d like to do that. I’ve just been busy as a man can be. My dad’s been very ill so I’ve been trying to be funny in the middle of things not so funny. But he’s still hilarious. He’s been making jokes about it the whole time.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/words/Bob+Saget/