Bob Saget

Robert Lane Saget was born on May 17, 1956, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a Jewish family. His father, Benjamin Saget, worked as a supermarket chain executive, and his mother, Rosalyn, was a hospital administrator. The family relocated to Norfolk, Virginia, during his early years, where Saget briefly attended Lake Taylor High School and later credited his developing sense of humor to his time as a rebellious student at the Conservative synagogue Temple Israel. Because his extended family remained in Philadelphia, he returned there for his bar mitzvah. The family subsequently moved to the Encino neighborhood of Los Angeles, where Saget encountered Larry Fine of The Three Stooges and listened to him tell stories. Before his senior year of high school, the family moved back to the Philadelphia area, and Saget graduated from Abington Senior High School. Though he originally planned to pursue medicine, an Honors English teacher recognized his creative potential and encouraged him to consider acting instead.

Saget enrolled in Temple University's film school, where he produced Through Adam's Eyes, a black-and-white short film about a boy who underwent reconstructive facial surgery. The project earned him an award of merit at the Student Academy Awards. While at Temple, he traveled by train to New York City to perform at comedy clubs including The Improv and Catch a Rising Star, incorporating a segment into his act in which he played the Beatles song "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" using a water bottle to simulate the guitar weeping. He graduated from Temple with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978. He briefly enrolled in graduate courses at the University of Southern California but left after only a few days, later describing himself at that time as a "cocky, overweight 22-year-old" who nearly died after his appendix became gangrenous and required emergency surgery at UCLA Medical Center on the Fourth of July.

Following a brief stint on CBS's The Morning Program in early 1987, Saget was cast as Danny Tanner on the sitcom Full House, which ran from 1987 to 1995 and reached the Nielsen ratings' Top 30 beginning with its third season. That same year, his daughter Aubrey was born, followed by daughters Lara Melanie in 1989 and Jennifer Belle in 1992. Also in 1989, he became the original host of America's Funniest Home Videos, a position he held until 1997, during which time he worked on both programs simultaneously. In 2009, he returned to the show for a 20th-anniversary one-hour special co-hosted with Tom Bergeron.

In 1996, Saget directed the ABC television film For Hope, based on the life of his sister Gay Saget, who had died from scleroderma three years earlier after being misdiagnosed numerous times; she had been diagnosed at 43 and died at 47. Saget served as a board member of the Scleroderma Research Foundation in connection with this cause. In 1998, he directed his first theatrical feature film, Dirty Work, starring Norm Macdonald and Artie Lange, which received broadly negative reviews upon release but later developed a cult following. That same year, he made a cameo appearance as a cocaine addict in the stoner comedy Half Baked.

In 2001, Saget starred in the WB series Raising Dad, playing another widowed father in a cast that included Kat Dennings, Brie Larson, and Jerry Adler. The series ran for a single season, from October 5, 2001, to May 10, 2002. Beginning in 2005, he provided the voice of the future Ted Mosby narrating the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother, a role he continued through the series finale on March 31, 2014. From 2005 to 2010, he appeared in four episodes of the HBO series Entourage playing a parody version of himself, and later appeared in the 2015 feature film based on that series. In 2006, he became host of the NBC game show 1 vs. 100, a role he held through 2008. His HBO comedy special That Ain't Right was released on DVD on August 28, 2007, dedicated to his father, Ben Saget, who died on January 30, 2007, at age 89 from complications related to congestive heart failure.

Saget appeared on Broadway in The Drowsy Chaperone, playing the role of Man in Chair during a limited four-month engagement while Jonathan Crombie, who regularly played the character, was traveling with the national tour. On January 4, 2008, his caricature was unveiled at Sardi's Restaurant. In April 2009, he starred alongside Cynthia Stevenson in the ABC sitcom Surviving Suburbia, which had originally been slated for The CW and ended after a single abbreviated season. In 2010, he starred in the A&E series Strange Days, in which he documented others engaged in unusual activities and lifestyles. He also returned to Broadway in Hand to God, extending his Broadway presence through 2015.

In 2014, Saget released his book Dirty Daddy, covering his career, comedy influences, and personal experiences with life and death. He supported the book with a small tour that included the Pemberton Music Festival, where he introduced Snoop Dogg before performing his own set. That same year, he toured Australia for the first time with a stand-up show called Bob Saget Live: The Dirty Daddy Tour, performing in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth. His 2014 stand-up album That's What I'm Talkin' About received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album. In 2015 and 2016, he guest-starred in two episodes of Grandfathered, a series starring and produced by his Full House co-star John Stamos. From 2016 to 2020, Saget reprised the role of Danny Tanner in fifteen episodes of Fuller House, the sequel to Full House, including both the series premiere and finale.

In 2017, Saget released the stand-up special Bob Saget: Zero to Sixty. In 2019, he was announced as host of ABC's Videos After Dark and also hosted the CMT game show Nashville Squares, in addition to making the first of three appearances as a panelist on To Tell the Truth. In 2020, he competed in season four of The Masked Singer as "Squiggly Monster" and launched a podcast titled Bob Saget's Here for You with Studio71, which ran for 130 episodes; its final episode, featuring comedian Dane Cook, was released posthumously on January 31, 2022.

Saget married Sherri Kramer in 1982, and the couple divorced in 1997. He later married television presenter Kelly Rizzo in 2018. Saget died on January 9, 2022.