Jodie Sweetin Channels ‘Inappropriate and Dark’ Comedy of TV Dad Bob Saget
Like TV dad, like TV daughter. Jodie Sweetin, the kid star of Full (and Fuller) House, now hosts Family Dinner, a monthly show at Los Angeles’s Bourbon Room in which she engages in banter with a panel of comedians. “Sometimes we have real lovely conversations, and sometimes it goes completely off the rails,” Sweetin told the Los Angeles Times. “I tell the comics anything goes.”
“It’s been a nice change to be able to be more me and a little less just Stephanie,” she says. Like her TV pop Bob Saget, Sweetin’s comedy leaves sitcom sweetness behind in favor of foul-mouthed funny stuff that can be “inappropriate and dark.” Let’s drop those eff-bombs!
Like a lot of kid stars, Sweetin had some tough young adult years before finding sobriety. These days, “comedy is the pressure release,” she says. “We’ve got to let that pressure out or we’re all going to snap and explode. And a lot of times the world doesn’t really feel very funny but it’s important we don’t lose our sense of humor.”
Andrea Barber, who played Full House’s Kimmy Gibbler, sees a lot of Saget in his TV kid. “There’s just no filter,” she says. “(Sweetin) very much reminds me of Bob Saget and his type of humor, which was also just very unhinged at times, very inappropriate at times, but hysterical. He says the thing that everyone was thinking but not saying out loud, and now that’s Jodie. She says what everyone is thinking out loud and then elevates it.”
@standupots
An example of that dark humor? When Sweetin and Barber appeared on a podcast, Sweetin noticed a vase that resembled an urn and started calling it ‘Bob.’ “First you want to cringe, like, ‘Oh, my gosh. Did anyone hear that?’” says Barber. “Then she’s laughing: ‘Bob would be so proud of me for cracking this joke.’ ‘You know what? You’re right. Let’s take the picture with the urn and title it Andrea, Jodie and Bob.’”
“As an adult, Bob and I were always going back and forth joking,” Sweetin says. “I just absorbed so much. When we lost him, I realized how deeply comedy and stand-up comedians impacted my life. I learned no matter what the horrific situation, you can always make it funny.”
Sweetin is getting more offers for stand-up sets and working on new jokes. “We need to have those brief moments where we can connect with other people and the world isn’t a complete garbage fire,” she says. “Just like 98 percent.”
