The Mystery of Bob Saget

It’s been over a year since Bob Saget’s (1956-2022) sudden and bewildering passing, so I hope it’s not “too soon” (to use a phrase that bedeviled his professional compadres Gilbert Gottfried and Bill Maher) for me to chime in on the topic.

When Saget died, the media kept calling him “America’s Dad”, which is, I think, really sad, because Full House (1987-1995) was such an appallingly lame, nearly unwatchable sit-com. But of course, I’m a bit older than the people who seem to have been fans of that show. My TV dad was probably Bill Cosby, and before that Robert Reed, and (in reruns) certainly Hugh Beaumont. And my contempt for America’s Funniest Home Videos (1989-1997) exceeds my scorn for Full House by orders of magnitude. I feel comfortable saying these things in this context, of course, because I follow it up with my view that Saget WAS a very funny and likeable performer, just not on those shows. I was reminded of it (as many were) when he showed up and turned out to be one of the funniest and most memorable high points of The Aristocrats (2005). And it reminded me that I had seen him doing stand-up on Letterman and Carson and other shows prior to his famous long-term gigs. Obviously, on TV his act tended to be cleaner than it was in clubs. There’s a great record of his genuine early set at Dangerfield’s on Youtube. People like to describe his act as “raunchy”, but to me that’s not its main point of distinction, and only a stupid person would think it was. What was funny was his style, which was deadpan and rapid fire. He moved so fast that you were just catching up with the last joke when he’d already fired off another one. And it was jokey-joke stuff. Very earthy stuff, the kind of stuff a funny co-worker pulls your leg with at the office. And throughout the years of his hit shows, he continued to turn up at various editions of Comic Relief and other places to remind us that he was actually a very funny guy, when he was doing his own material.

When those two shows went off the air Saget directed Norm MacDonald and Artie Lange in the 1998 movie Dirty Work, which later became a sort of legendary joke in and of itself due to its terribleness. He then tried another sit-com, the short-lived Raising Dad (2001) with Jerry Adler. And he narrated the voice of the older Ted on How I Met YourMother (2005-2014). His 2013 comedy record That’s What I’m Talking About was nominated for a Grammy.

And then his mysterious death in early 2022. I freely admit that events like these are the sort of things I obsess about. In the unlikely event you never heard or followed the story, Saget was found dead in his Orlando hotel room. He was lying in bed, partially clothed, with the covers up. But it was not a case of “he died quietly in his sleep”. The cause of death was blunt force trauma. The back and front of his skull were both seriously fractured. According to numerous highly credible medical and forensic experts, it was the kind of injury (injuries, really) more consistent with a fall onto pavement from an upper story, or a severe car accident, or getting smashed in the head with a baseball bat. So this obviously had people wondering. Saget had been fine after his gig the night before. There are several photos of him at the club where he performed and at the hotel in the hours afterward. He sent a tweet from his room. He hung out the “do not disturb” sign (caught on surveillance camera). Then the next morning, his body was found.

Authorities did not release a lot of detail, but the idea that he fell and had an accident in the room seemed unlikely. The floor in the room was carpeted. There was also a kind of vinyl cushioning covering the headboard of the bed. And if he’d slipped in the shower, and sustained injuries that severe, how did he make it to the bed? And so the internet went crazy. There were murder theories. The door to the corridor was locked but the door to an adjoining room was not, which made it seem possible that an intruder came in. There were also idiotic conspiracy theories about him dying from Covid vaccine. I’m not a conspiracy person, and my own questions never went as far as speculating in a serious way about murder, which is a fairly extreme conclusion to rush to, particularly concerning a figure as widely beloved as Saget. Without deciding that it was murder though, you could be forgiven for wondering if he had been the victim, say, of an angry audience member who’d been insulted by his act. Or (much less likely) had he connected with bad company during the night, as partying post-performance comedians (usually younger ones) have been known to do? There was no evidence for either of these scenarios, though the explanation the public was given so vague as to be unsatisfying.

I think in such cases (the one at the heart of The Staircase is a very similar one) it is beneficial to give the public as much information as you can in order to staunch the rumor-mongering. When the public hears “the family wishes to protect their privacy” or whatever, it only fuels speculation, most of it of the irresponsible sort. As it happens, the Vice show (Re) Solved just dropped an episode called What Really Happened to Bob Saget? which answered the question to my satisfaction. And I’m going to go ahead and spoil it for you, because it’s worth watching in any case, and it happens to reinforce the official explanation. The difference is that in this video piece, you get much more detail than you get in newspaper and internet articles. This is the crux of it: Saget had Covid as well as heart and blood pressure issues, and was on medication. He could easily have gotten dizzy, but even if he hadn’t, there was water on the floor outside the shower. It looks like his feet went out from under him, smashing his upper body with a great deal of force into a marble section of wall next to the shower. He had a brief period of lucidity following the accident (not uncommon), so he managed to put himself to bed, passed out, then expired.

The vexing part will always be the lack of witnesses, which is exactly what fuels all the curiosity. When people say “we will never know”, humans are not wired to be okay with that. What do you mean, we’ll never know? We’ve got to know, so we WILL know, damn it, and if you say we won’t know, you must be hiding something! But why the hell would anyone hide the cause of death of BOB SAGET? What is he, Trotsky? To me the story points up something more eloquent about show business: the loneliness of life on the road. It reminds me of Janis Joplin’s death. Yes, she OD’d. But if someone had been with her, would she have copped? And even if she had, someone might have called for help in time. It can actually be fatal sometimes not to have someone with you in the room.

I leave you with this, in the spirit of Saget’s own sense of humor as revealed in The Aristocrats: had there been a surveillance camera in the room, America might have gotten its most awful “Funniest Home Video” ever. Sometimes, it’s better not to know.

For more on show business history, please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. And please stay tuned for my next book Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.