So the other night HBO aired a Bob Saget standup special, "That Ain't Right," and I watched it. I'd heard from a lot of different people that Saget's routines are so over-the-top profane that there's kind of an artistry to them, and I can see their point. One of the most interesting things about his staccato, self-interrupting, rapid-foul style is the way he seems to break character periodically to apologize for how depraved he is. Sometimes he seems to be sincerely apologizing for needing to take an extreme course to distinguish his standup identity from his family-comedy past, and yet sometimes he just bursts forth with random strings of nasty words or mentions his personality problems or his therapy sessions as if to suggest he really is a Tourette's sufferer. Obviously, if you can't always tell what's a performance and what isn't, Saget is doing a pretty good job at making you think of him as someone other than Danny Tanner.

The trouble is, he's not even a little bit funny. Past the initial shock of seeing a guy who was in your life every afternoon in junior high school gently raising his three button-cute daughters doing all these riffs on bestiality and pedophilia, Saget isn't a good enough writer to keep the laughs going. He even by request repeats his popular bits from movies of the last several years (The Aristocrats and Half Baked), which is always a dead giveway of a comic desperately trying to fill time.

Watching Saget kind of sadly and pathetically attempt to get people to laugh with him instead of at him reminded me both of Michael Richards' troubles a while back and something my colleague Scott wrote about the difference between hardworking touring comics in the real world and one-note L.A. club standups who are just trying to land a pilot. Richards was an unfunny standup comedian but excellent physical performer (UHF)who got a good supporting role on a successful sitcom, but since there doesn't seem to be much demand for a Kramer spinoff, he doesn't have much to do with himself these days. Unable to get people to laugh the honest way, he went for shock value with his infamous race rant, and it backfired on him to the degree that he may never show his face in a comedy club again. (This was the point the episode in the recent "South Park" run featuring Richards had to make -- Richards isn't a bigot, he's just an unfunny comedian.)

I think standup comedy is the hardest popular entertainment discipline that exists. No wonder so many abandon it for the more lucrative world of TV, where you get a whole team of professionals to feed you jokes, makeup artists and flattering lights, and a studio audience and practiced comedy editors to make you seem a lot funnier than you actually are. I feel a little sorry for Bob Saget, which I think is one of the things he's trying to capitalize on -- the most poignant bit of his HBO special was when he was wistfully reflecting on the box-office failure of the film Dirty Work. Not because Dirty Work was any kind of masterpiece, but it wasn't any better or any worse than any number of Rob Schneider and Adam Sandler movies that have made a ton of money, and Saget directed it. Had the film succeeded, he'd have a reasonably dignified career working on the "SNL" spinoff scripts on which Adam McKay and Penelope Spheeris passed. Instead, he's singing a song to the tune of a Backstreet Boys hit called "Danny Tanner Wasn't Gay." Well, I can't hold it against him, he's doing what he needs to be doing for the money. As are we all.