Bob Saget on Working with Richard Pryor | Joe Rogan

The J.Rogan experience. So we would sit there and it was right before he got Saturday Night Live. What year was this? Eighty-six. It was one year before he got that and before I had been in a Richard Pryor movie that was the first thing of consequence. And then... What movie was that? Critical Condition. You got to work with Pryor. I got to spend a month with him. And I got to hang out with him because I was one of the hosts at the store for eight years. And you got to work with Pryor when Pryor was Pryor. What was after the fire? But it was still like... It was 100% Pryor. Live at the Sun-Tet's trip was after the fire. It was after the fire. That was his best. He did Jojo Dancer. And Critical Condition was directed by Michael Apt had a great director who did, Cole Miner's Daughter made a lot of important movies. Did the 7-Up series. Do you ever see that? 7-Up, 14-Up, 21-Up. No. Took seven people through their lives from London and followed them every seven years to the documentary about them. Oh, wow. Just a real special, brilliant, lovely man. He was head of the academy for a while. Anyway, so what happened was... But working with Pryor, we were... When you're doing a movie, we were in a shower stall in an old hospital and it was supposed to be Rikers Island or whatever the hell that prison is up there. Is it Rikers? Which one? In New York. What's the... I think that's Rikers, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's what it was. We were doing that, but we shot it in High Point, North Carolina with really good actors, Joe Montania and Ruben Blades and all these Randall Techs cobs, some really cool... No shit. Cool, weird, eclectic group. And... I just watched him the other day in Raising Arizona. He's a great actor. That's great, man. That movie was wild. That's one of the... That low point of view shot in the supermarket. Images in that... In a lot of Coen Brothers movies. They're the best. Come on, man. It's fucking shit. I love Big Lebowski. Big Lebowski is my wife. Every day, it's like, let's just watch the Big Lebowski. It's fucking classic, man. It's a dude floating in space, man. Sorry, I was interrupting you. So you're working with Pryor. Well, that's what I do. So we're in a shower stall and we became friends. We would go to dinner. I was the guy. I'm always wanting to make things better somehow. I was raised that way by my dad and my mom to try to make peace for people. That's the thing. And he liked that I would invite him because people didn't invite him to shit because he was kind of unapproachable to some people. So we would go to dinner and we would laugh and I would make him laugh. We had to do one scene 40 takes. One shot, that was a long steady camp shot. We had a dead body in it that was covered in water. And I was supposed to say something like, oh, the guy was in the drink. We found out... It was a fake looking body. And every time I said this serious line, I was this young doctor, Richard just cracked up. And so he's looking in my face and there's no bigger honor. Look at you. Look at you, baby face motherfucker. Fuck, man. How old were you then? 26, 27. And that was a good scene. That's Ruben. Wow. I remember all of this. He and I... So he couldn't... The fact that he couldn't look in my face and kept laughing and it was a serious scene. Do you know what an honor that is? Oh, man. That's amazing. So the guy that was an idol. So I'm sitting in the shower with him and he shows me this thing. This is graphic. He shows me this scrubbing brush and one side's soft and the other side's just bristles. And he says, I don't think he'd mind me telling you this. I always think about when you talk about someone that you love that's deceased, would they be okay with what you're saying? So it's not TMZ garbage. So he would take the hard scrubbing part and he said, this is what they took my skin off with. After the fire, they had to scrub my whole body with this shit. And I just sat there and I remember crying. I think there was the combined empathy. And then I told him of like, my sister that died. And then he was telling me, you know, you just get close with people. And then one night I didn't invite him to dinner because he'd had a hard day and he was mad at me the next day. And I was like, oh my God. So he was enjoying. So I said, but he was in a rough place. He was complicated human. But I remember saying too, because when you're acting, you're just, I don't know, I was green. I said, so you're upset with me. I'm so sorry. This means we're friends, right? Because I upset you, right? And then we went to dinner again.