Free Dirty Daddy: The Chronicles of a Family Man Turned Filthy Comedian by Bob Saget Page B

so I couldn’t hear people asking for their checks.
    The chorus was something like: “Masochists and sadists unite one and all, bondage is the rage, come on let’s have a ball.” Don’t ask me why I was compelled at seventeen to write an S & M anthem. When I say it was upbeat, understand you still couldn’t sing or dance to it . . . but I guess you could stand up and look like you were having some kind of seizure to it.
    Hey, you gotta start somewhere. That was my first official stand-up gig, but my first paying gig was through a friend of mine, Alan Baral, who gave me $50 to perform at his school, Beaver College. Oh, how I wish I had gone there. It had been an all-girls school originally—you can’t make this stuff up—and then it became coed, which is how Alan got me booked in their college lounge to perform some of the songs and comedy bits I did. I was supposed to do an hour but only had about eighteen minutes of material at that point: a couple comedy songs, originals and parodies—the highest form of comedy music behind lip-synching.
    There was no light in the cafeteria lounge so I brought my own floodlight bulbs on a metal strip, which I pointed up at myself from the floor. It was lit like a horror film and played like one as well. Only someone coming up and throwing a bucket of blood on me would have given me a better closing. In 2001, Beaver College changed its name to Arcadia University. I believe I had everything to do with that.
    So that was the beginning of it all, the illustrious start to my life on the comedy stage. And for the next ten years or so, from the age of seventeen to about twenty-seven, I tried to make a career out of it.
    In that time I watched some of my peers become big successes and others fall by the wayside. Always a nice expression: fell by the wayside . In some cases, people fell off because they didn’t have what it took, but often they were doing many of the right things but events beyond their control just hit them out of nowhere, like lightning hitting a tree in a thunderstorm. Or lightning hitting you in a thunderstorm.
    Growing up in Norfolk I had a friend named B. J. Leiderman who was hit by lightning when he was eight years old. He survived. I actually just spoke to him for the first time in forty-four years. I wanted to confirm I had the facts right. As I said earlier, everybody should write a book—it’s great, you get to talk to people you knew when you were eight.
    I knew B. J. from riding the bus together to Hebrew school since we were five. And we weren’t even Jewish, we just wanted to meet young Jewish girls. Our bus driver was Mr. Wilson, and when I was bad he would pinch my butt as hard as he could so I would stop misbehaving and sit down. I realize now that was child abuse. But he’s long gone and so are the bruises. And between us, I don’t have much of an ass at all, so if he tried that now, he’d be grabbing ass bone.
    And even if I did have any meat on my ass today that he was able to grab ahold of right here and now, Mr. Wilson is sadly dead, so he would have to be a zombie to grab my ass, and that just wouldn’t happen, because I would get away from him before he could get near my ass, ’cause—and I know it’s not popular-culture speak—but I fucking hate zombies. I used to love the band the Zombies, my fave song of theirs being “Time of the Season.” When I hear it, it takes me back to my Bar Mitzvah days.

    For those of you who don’t know what a Bar Mitzvah is, it’s when a boy with a young girl’s voice becomes a man. Then there’s a Bra Mitzvah, which is when a thirteen-year-old girl becomes endowed with breasts ahead of her friends. And that is indeed a mitzvah (good deed). To have curves ahead of the curve.
    As you may be able to tell, I did not have sex until I was seventeen. I was a troubled, lonely teen. Up until about the age of nine, I still had my mojo. But after that, it was all downhill for a long, long time. Nine was