He also directed a comedy starring Norm Macdonald and Artie Lange, “Dirty Work,” which was widely panned on its release in 1998.
Returning to the comedy circuit and mocking his wholesome TV alter ego, Mr. Saget developed a cult following as a comedian who could unleash torrents of scatological material.
In 2005, he featured in “The Aristocrats,” an essay film about the history of a joke that a New York Times film critic, A.O. Scott, called both “a work of painstaking and penetrating scholarship” and “possibly the filthiest, vilest, most extravagantly obscene documentary ever made.” In 2010, he hosted a documentary series, “Strange Days With Bob Saget,” in which he spent time with pro wrestlers, bikers, Bigfoot hunters and others.
On “Jimmy Kimmel Live” in 2017, Mr. Saget remembered how Don Rickles, a longtime friend of his and Mr. Stamos’s, would describe Mr. Saget’s act. “He comes out like a Jewish Clark Kent,” Mr. Saget recalled Mr. Rickles as saying. He then demonstrated how his friend would break into a song about a dog and a monkey, repeatedly using a verb censored on network television.
But Mr. Saget never totally relinquished his family-man persona: Not only did he reprise the role of Danny Tanner on a sequel series, “Fuller House,” he spent nine seasons voicing the narrator of “How I Met Your Mother,” an older, wiser version of the show’s protagonist, Ted Mosby.
“My first thought was, Why can’t he do it? Or how much cigarettes and booze do you have to have to sound like me?” Mr. Saget told Larry King in 2014, referring to Josh Radnor, the actor who played Ted. But, he added, “I did it immediately because I read it. It was a love letter; it was a relationship show.”
