Saget, Bob

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    The Artists We Lost in 2022, in Their Words

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    Music innovators who sang of coal country and “Great Balls of Fire.” An actress who made a signature role out of a devilish baker who meets a fiery end. The trailblazing heart of “In the Heat of the Night.”The creative people who died this year include many whose lives helped shape our own — through the art they made, and through the words they said. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their own voices.Sidney Poitier.Sam Falk/The New York Times“Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play.”— Sidney Poitier, actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“People in the past have done what we’re trying to do infinitely better. That’s why, for one’s own sanity, to keep one’s own sense of proportion, one must regularly go back to them.”— Peter Brook, director, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Ronnie Spector.Art Zelin/Getty Images“Every song is a little piece of my life.”— Ronnie Spector, singer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Yuriko.Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“Dance is living. Dance is, for me, it’s survival.”— Yuriko, dancer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Kirstie Alley.Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“The question is, how do you create with what you have?”— Kirstie Alley, actress, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)Carmen Herrera.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win. But you know how many paintings I threw in the garbage?”— Carmen Herrera, artist, born 1915 (Read the obituary.)“I decided that in every scene, you’re naked. If you’re dressed in a parka, what’s the difference if you’re dressed in nothing at all, if you’re exploring yourself?”— William Hurt, actor, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Takeoff.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global Citizen“You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh. You gotta have character. A hard punchline can make you laugh, but you gotta know how to say it.”— Takeoff, rapper, born 1994 (Read the obituary.)“I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”— Bob Saget, comedian and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Olivia Newton-John.Las Vegas News Bureau/EPA, via Shutterstock“I do like to be alone at times, just to breathe.”— Olivia Newton-John, singer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Movies are like clouds that sit over reality: If I do cinema well, I can uncover what is beneath, my friends, my allies, what I am, where I come from.”— Jean-Luc Godard, director, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Sam Gilliam.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”— Sam Gilliam, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“Everyone says that I was a role model. But I never thought of it when I was doing the music and when I was performing. I just wanted to make good music.”— Betty Davis, singer-songwriter, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Nichelle Nichols.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images“The next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”— Nichelle Nichols, actress, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be with Albert Einstein at Panzanella.”— Judy Tenuta, comedian, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)“In time, writers learn that good fiction editors care as much about the story as the writer does, or almost, anyway. And you really often end up, the three of you — the writer, and the editor, and the story — working on this obdurate, beautiful thing, this brand-new creation.”— Roger Angell, writer and editor, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Jennifer Bartlett.Susan Wood/Getty Images“I spent 30 years trying to convince people and myself that I was smart, that I was a good painter, that I was this or that. It’s not going to happen. The only person that it should happen for is me. This is what I was meant to do.”— Jennifer Bartlett, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Christine McVie.P. Floyd/Daily Express, via Hulton Archive and Getty Images“I didn’t aspire to be on the stage playing piano, let alone singing, because I never thought I had much of a voice. But my option was window-dresser or jump off the cliff and try this. So I jumped off the cliff.”— Christine McVie, musician and songwriter, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge. You go to the precipice and lean over it.”— Maria Ewing, opera singer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Taylor Hawkins.John Atashian/Getty Images“There’s so much in what I do that is beyond hard work — there’s luck and timing and just being in the right place at the right time with the right hairdo.”— Taylor Hawkins, drummer, born 1972 (Read the obituary.)“I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”— Angela Lansbury, actress, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)“I always try to improve upon what I’ve done. If something’s not working, I’ll change it to make it better. I’m an artist and a performer above all, and I don’t limit myself.”— Elza Soares, singer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Leslie Jordan.Fred Prouser/Reuters“I’m always working, always. I got to keep the ship afloat.”— Leslie Jordan, actor, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“The reward of the work has always been the work itself.”— David McCullough, historian and author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“To me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)James Caan.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon, and my passion was to grow up with my son.”— James Caan, actor, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Tina Ramirez.Michael Falco for The New York Times“Words are unnecessary when movement and feeling and expression can say it all.”— Tina Ramirez, dancer and founder of Ballet Hispánico, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Claes Oldenburg.Tony Evans/Getty Images“I haven’t done anything on the subject of flies. It’s the sort of thing that could interest me. Anything could interest me, actually.”— Claes Oldenburg, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“A skull is a beautiful thing.”— Lee Bontecou, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth.”— Charles Fuller, playwright, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Ray Liotta.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images“One review said I played a sleazy, heartless, cold person who you don’t really care about. Great! I love it; that’s what I played.”— Ray Liotta, actor, born around 1954 (Read the obituary.)Jerry Lee Lewis.Thomas S. England/Getty Images“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist. I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”— Jerry Lee Lewis, musician, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“All of us have something built into our ears that comes from the place where we grow up and where we were as children.”— George Crumb, composer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Anne Heche. SGranitz/WireImage, via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”— Anne Heche, actress, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)Louie Anderson.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“That’s my goal every night: Hopefully at some point in my act, you have forgotten whatever trouble you had when you came in.”— Louie Anderson, comedian and actor, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)“Adult human beings live with the certainty of grief, which deepens us and opens us to other people, who have been there, too.”— Peter Straub, author, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Ned Rorem.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I believe in the importance of the unimportant — in the quotidian pathos.”— Ned Rorem, composer, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)Gilbert Gottfried.Fred Hermansky/NBC, via Getty Images“I don’t always mean to offend. I only sometimes mean to offend.”— Gilbert Gottfried, comedian, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“Merce Cunningham is quoted somewhere as saying he wanted a company that danced the way he danced. I kept doing the same thing. And I began to wonder why I was insisting that they be as limited as I am.”— David Gordon, choreographer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Hilary Mantel.Ellie Smith for The New York Times“The universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”— Hilary Mantel, author, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“Getting the right people with a shared vision is three-quarters of the battle.”— Anne Parsons, arts administrator, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)Paula Rego.Rita Barros/Getty Images“My paintings are stories, but they are not narratives, in that they have no past and future.”— Paula Rego, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Javier Marías.Quim Llenas/Getty Images“When you are addressing your fellow citizens, you have to give some hope sometimes, even if you want to say that everything is terrible, that we are governed by a bunch of gangsters. In a novel, you can be much more pessimistic. You are more savage, you are wilder, you are freer, you think truer, you think better.”— Javier Marías, author, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)“Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm.”— Richard Taruskin, musicologist, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker. I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”— Pablo Milanés, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Peter Bogdanovich.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do.”— Peter Bogdanovich, director, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Loretta Lynn.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“I think the highest point of my career was in the late ’70s. I had No. 1 songs, a best-selling book and a movie made about my life. But I think it was also the lowest point for me as well. Life gets away from you so fast when you move fast.”— Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Thich Nhat Hanh.Golding/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, monk and author, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images; Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. More

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      Bob Saget’s Autopsy Report Describes Severe Skull Fractures

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      Such an extensive head injury would likely have left the actor confused, if not unconscious, experts said.Bob Saget, the comedian and actor, died after what appeared to be a significant blow to the head, one that fractured his skull in several places and caused bleeding across both sides of his brain, according to an autopsy report released on Friday.The findings complicated the picture of Mr. Saget’s death that has emerged in recent days: Far from a head bump that might have been shrugged off, the autopsy described an unmistakably serious set of injuries that would at the very least have probably left someone confused, brain experts said.The report, prepared by Dr. Joshua Stephany, the chief medical examiner of Orange and Osceola counties in Florida, ascribed Mr. Saget’s injuries to a fall.“It is most probable that the decedent suffered an unwitnessed fall backwards and struck the posterior aspect of his head,” Dr. Stephany wrote, referring to the back of the skull.Still, the autopsy left a number of unresolved questions about how exactly Mr. Saget, 65, was so badly hurt. He was found dead in a hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton Orlando, Grande Lake on Jan. 9 during a weekend of stand-up comedy acts. His family said this week that the authorities determined that he had hit his head, “thought nothing of it and went to sleep.”If the actor struck his head hard enough, and in just the wrong place, it is possible that fractures would have extended to other parts of his skull, brain injury experts said. Situations where someone cannot break their fall are even more dangerous.“It’s like an egg cracking,” said Dr. Jeffrey Bazarian, an emergency physician and concussion expert at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “You hit it in one spot, and it can crack from the back to the front.”But experts said that with such an extensive injury, it was unlikely that Mr. Saget would have intentionally ignored it. The injury would likely have left him confused, if not unconscious.“I doubt he was lucid,” Dr. Bazarian said, “and doubt he thought, ‘I’m just going to sleep this off.’”Some neurosurgeons said that it would be unusual for a typical fall to cause Mr. Saget’s set of fractures — to the back, the right side and the front of his skull. Those doctors said that the injuries appeared more reminiscent of ones suffered by people who fall from a considerable height or get thrown from their seat in a car crash.The autopsy, though, found no injuries to other parts of Mr. Saget’s body, as would be expected in a lengthier fall. The medical examiner ruled that the death was accidental. The local sheriff’s office had previously said there were no signs of foul play.“This is significant trauma,” said Dr. Gavin Britz, the chair in neurosurgery at Houston Methodist. “This is something I find with someone with a baseball bat to the head, or who has fallen from 20 or 30 feet.”Dr. Britz noted that the autopsy described fractures to particularly thick parts of the skull, as well as to bones in the roof of the eye socket. “If you fracture your orbit,” he said, referring to those eye bones, “you have significant pain.”The knock ruptured veins in the space between the membrane covering the brain and the brain itself, causing blood to pool, the autopsy indicated. The brain, secured in a hard skull, has nowhere to move, doctors said, and the result is a compression of brain centers critical for breathing and other vital functions.No alcohol or illegal drugs were detected in the actor’s system, according to the autopsy. But there were signs of Clonazepam, commonly known as Klonopin, a benzodiazepine that is used to prevent seizures and treat panic attacks. Tests also found Trazodone, an antidepressant, the report said.There was no indication in the autopsy findings that either of those drugs might have contributed to Mr. Saget’s injuries. But doctors said that they could make people sleepy and contribute to a fall.Benzodiazepines are widely prescribed for older people, despite warnings about the side effects. People who take them face increased risks of falls and fractures, of auto accidents and of reduced cognition.Use of multiple drugs “is a very dangerous cause of falls in the elderly,” said Dr. Neha Dangayach, the director of neuro-emergencies management and transfers for the Mount Sinai Health System. She said that some combinations could cause drops in blood pressure or confusion.The report noted that Mr. Saget had an enlarged heart, but did not suggest any link to his death. It also found signs of the coronavirus on a PCR test, but did not suggest that the virus contributed to Mr. Saget’s death. The actor said on a podcast in early January that he had contracted the virus, without specifying exactly when. PCR tests can show the presence of the virus days or even weeks after someone has recovered.Mr. Saget, best known for his role on the sitcom ‘Full House’ and for hosting ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos,’ thanked the “appreciative audience” of his stand-up comedy set in a Tweet early in the morning on Jan. 9, the day of his death.“I had no idea I did a 2 hr set tonight,” he said. “I’m happily addicted again to this.” More

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      John Stamos on Bob Saget and the Many Stages of Their Friendship

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      In an interview, the “Full House” star recalls everything from early clashes to Cyrano-like support, as well as the last time he saw his former co-star.When the stand-up comic and actor Bob Saget died on Jan. 9 at 65, stunned friends and family responded with an outpouring of tributes — among them, John Stamos, Saget’s co-star on “Full House” and the Netflix sequel “Fuller House,” and his longtime friend. In a video interview on Monday from his home in Los Angeles, Stamos reminisced about how what began as a sometimes fractious working relationship developed into a love for the ages. These are edited excerpts.At Bob’s memorial, his ex-wife [Sherri Kramer], who is the mother of his three kids, came to me. She was crying. “He loved you so much. He loved you so much. But in the beginning, he hated you.” What? [Laughs.] “He would come home and he was so jealous of you. He would just complain about you so much.”My junior high school drama teacher emailed me the other day with condolences, and he said, “Do you remember I came to Hawaii? Bob was so nice to me, but man, you were really unhappy with him.”And that’s the truth.Our styles completely clashed. He was a comic. If there was even one person on the set, he had to make them laugh. And I was, “Where is the drama?” I think we met in the middle. But we both went in kicking and screaming, not wanting to bend what we do.He could be painfully distracting — disruptive — because you’re here, let’s get this scene, let’s find out what works, what doesn’t. And he’s like [punching the air as if for each joke], “Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” I’d go, “Bob.” He couldn’t stop it. I think, if I may say, that it could have been a detriment sometimes to him.Saget and Stamos in a scene from “Full House.” They both went into the series “kicking and screaming, not wanting to bend what we do,” Stamos recalled. ABC, via Getty ImagesBut here’s the deal with him: He found a balance like nobody I’ve ever seen. He would make up for all of that with just as much love or more. I had so many people call me, saying what Bob meant to them and how he helped them. He was maniacally of service at all times.At his memorial, people started in with the jokes, and it was needed. Dave Chappelle did [two long sets]. I said, “You’re the GOAT. You’re the greatest of all time.” And the respect that he gave Bob the last five, 10 years of his life, I said, “That was so important to Bob, and I really appreciate it.” He goes, “Are you kidding me? When I was a young comic, I looked up to him and he took me under his wing. He helped me.” Which I didn’t know.Bob was bombastic with his love and his friendship. If you were a friend or even an acquaintance, he was like this [mashes hands together] on you all the time.I looked at this video of us of the last episode of “Full House,” the final bows. We all gathered around, and Bob eventually walked over and he hugged me, kissed me. But I don’t know how close I was to him at the end there. I didn’t think I needed a Bob in my life. I had my parents. I had my faith. I had whatever.But then my dad dies, and this guy steps up like nobody in my life because everybody else was busted up. My sisters, my mom. But Bob wasn’t, and he just stepped in and took care of me, even to the point of “Can I host your dad’s funeral?” Two hours of dirty jokes that I think my dad would’ve liked. But he gave people what they needed at that moment. Everybody needed a laugh, and he did it.I think that one really cemented our friendship. And then it just got closer and closer from there, to the point of we just were there through all the most important moments. Now I have to get through them without him, you know?His divorce was first, and I think that’s when maybe he would say I was around for him. I was his Cyrano through a lot of stuff. I remember being on a text on a first date with him, telling him what to say, what to do. And then when he broke up with that girl, he was practically living on my couch. I mean, we were as close as anyone could be. But everybody said that about him.Bob was a great listener, but sometimes you had to tell him to listen. Here’s the truth, too: There was a point in our life and our friendship, about 10 or 11 years ago, when we were like a married couple. We were both single and around each other a lot, and I said, “You’ve got to go to a therapist if we’re going to stay friends.” I had this great guy. Bob started going to him, and it really helped. Bob would be talking about himself, talking about himself, and then you’d see something in his eyes go, “Oh. Now I’ve got to ask about John. ‘How are you?’”But next to my mom, he was my biggest cheerleader, my biggest fan. He would brag about me to people. When I brought “Fuller House” back and it was a success, at first you could see he was like, “Why didn’t I think of that?” And then almost every interview it was, “John did this. He’s the one who got us together. We owe it to him.”He was the most egotistical humble guy on the planet. He was the most insecure person I’ve met in my life. He did this thing where he would inflate himself. Every girl that came onto “Full House” — “She loves me. She’s got a crush on me.”“I don’t know, Bob. Cindy Crawford, really?” I think he overcompensated sometimes.My job for many, many years was to help him to understand how good he was and how smart he was, how funny he was and how much people loved him. I guarantee you he went into that grave not knowing the love that this world has for him, and that saddens me so much because he wanted that so bad. He craved being accepted and loved and appreciated, and people knowing how damn good he was. And they did know it, but they didn’t get it to him in time.Bob was always worried about everyone else, but he talked about death a lot. His wife, Kelly Rizzo, said she had a premonition. I didn’t see it. The last time we were all together, we went on a double date to Nobu, maybe a month before he passed away. He didn’t look like a guy who was going to die, but he was very calm, which was odd for Bob. He was at peace somehow. And he listened and he was thoughtful and didn’t interrupt; he cared about what we were saying.I hate to say it, but it was the Bob that I always wanted to see. And it was the last time I saw him. More

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      Louie Anderson and the Compassion of America’s Eternal Kid

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      He displayed an empathetic humanity that he shared offstage with his friend Bob Saget. The loss of both comics represents the end of an era.One of the first killer jokes in the stand-up act of Louie Anderson was about the meanness of older brothers. Imitating one of his own in an intimidating voice, he warned that there was a monster in a swamp nearby. With childlike fear in his eyes, Anderson reported that he avoided that area “until I got a little older and a little smarter and a little brother.”Pivoting to the future in an instant, he adopted the older brother voice, pointing to the swamp and telling his sibling: “That’s where your real parents live.”Anderson, who died Friday at 68 from complications of cancer, had five brothers and five sisters, but over the course of a sterling comedy career spanning four decades, he established a much larger family of colleagues. The comedian Bob Saget, who also died this month, was a younger brother of sorts. They started in stand-up on the West Coast around the same time and had breakthroughs in the same 1985 episode of HBO’s “Young Comedians Special” (hosted by Rodney Dangerfield), which back then was second only to “The Tonight Show” as a springboard for stand-up careers.Just last May, Anderson and Saget took part in a loving conversation on a podcast, reminiscing and laughing, and gingerly approaching topics with the sensitivity and warmth of intimates catching up during the long, isolating pandemic. It’s funny and now, considering the loss of both men, terribly heartbreaking. Both still prolific in their 60s, they sounded joyful about the current moment and were looking to the future. Saget talked about wanting to direct a movie that would appeal to everyone, and Anderson said he wished to play Fatty Arbuckle.None of that will happen, of course, and as these friends talked about their careers, it struck me that losing them represents the end of a key part of an era.Clockwise from top left, Yakov Smirnoff, Jeff Altman, Tim Thomerson,  Anderson, Jim Carrey, Pauley Shore, Mitzi Shore and Saget at a celebration of the Comedy Store’s 20th anniversary in 1992.Chris Haston/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesWhen you think of the 1980s comedy boom, the first artist that comes to mind for many is Jerry Seinfeld and his clinically observational brand of humor. For others, it might be the rock-star flamboyance of Eddie Murphy or Andrew Dice Clay. But in the days of three major networks, the culture incentivized a warmly inclusive, rigorously relatable comedy that could appeal to a broad mainstream and, at its best and most resonant, had an empathetic humanity.The outpouring of love for Bob Saget took some by surprise and was in part a testament to his good-natured, filthy humor and personal generosity. But it was also because of a vast audience that saw him as the friendly paternal face on “Full House” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” That comedy fans also knew him as one of the dirtiest joke tellers around burnished and deepened his reputation. But if Saget became one of the few cultural figures who could be described as America’s Dad (does any current star get described in such sweeping terms these days?), Anderson fit seamlessly into an equally idealized role as our culture’s eternal kid.There was a boyish innocence and sweetness to Anderson that never left him, even when he was playing a mother on “Baskets,” a remarkable and sincere performance that marked the start of his acclaimed second act (which included his turn in “Search Party”). Like Saget, Anderson had a broad résumé as an actor, author and television host, but he was a stand-up at heart who never stopped touring. I saw him do a 90-minute set in 2018, and he had the low-key improvisational, searching energy of someone still obsessed with finding an incredible new bit.There was a remarkable consistency in Anderson’s work from his early stand-up to his later performances, in spirit and also in subject matter. This included a focus on food: No one told more fat jokes, like his longtime opening line, which he used during his first appearance on “The Tonight Show” and again on “Conan” last March: “Listen, I can’t stay long. I’m between meals.”More prominently, his great topic was family, particularly his ever-optimistic mother and irate father. (As soft-spoken as he could be, Anderson could also yell as much as Sam Kinison.) While his early comedy featured plenty of punch lines, Anderson’s great gift was acting out stories, brilliantly evoking moments with quick-change characterizations, displaying the depth and technique of a seasoned actor.Anderson in his much-praised turn as a mother on “Baskets.” Erica Parise/FXIn one lovely, unusually nuanced scene for his 1987 hour at the Guthrie Theater, near his hometown, St. Paul, he recalled his parents fighting. It begins with a teasing imitation of his father, a classic belligerent blowhard of an old-timer. In Anderson’s telling, he was the kind of guy who would say things like, “When I was a kid, they didn’t have schools. I had to find smart people and follow them around.”In the show, his father boasts in a brusque, nonsensical rant about being a veteran of “World War I, World War II, everything, Korea, everywhere.”Leaving the scene for an instant, Anderson explained that as a boy, he had to look to his mother for the truth — then he unfurrowed his brow, flattened his face and utterly transformed into a soft-spoken woman gently shaking her head. As the audience cracked up, he lingered silently before lowering his voice and saying: “World War II.” There’s something about the quietness of the way he has her explain this that is touching. His mother wants to correct the record but not humiliate. The scene escalates into a fight, and while it could have been incredibly dark, it somehow isn’t.The reason, I think, is that the core of Louie Anderson’s art has always been a bend-over-backward compassion, a grace for everyone, including (maybe especially) those he teases or criticizes, like his father.It’s a quality that can seem in short supply, but it’s one you hear so vividly in that podcast with Saget, who asked Anderson if he ever thought of being a therapist or minister. Anderson replied that he found therapy in comedy.Because they’re comedians, the talk eventually turned to death, specifically Dangerfield’s funeral in 2004. Saget officiated at the service and said he was actually heckled by Jay Leno. In the podcast, Saget thanked Anderson for sticking up for him. Anderson told him: “I know that must have hurt you, what he did. I wasn’t going to let you hang there. Jay probably just did it out of nervousness. Maybe he needed to do that to not burst out crying.”Leno is a polarizing figure for comics of their generation, and to his detractors, he’s an unsentimental joke-telling machine, which might have been part of the subtext when Saget quickly responded to Anderson’s suggestion that Leno was trying to avoid shedding tears: “I don’t think he does that.”In the gentle way a friend does, Anderson disagreed. “I bet he does.” Saget then immediately changed his mind, almost as if he recognized that the humanity of this thought outpaced the fun of his gibe.“All I ever want to do is hug you,” he said to Anderson at one moment.It was unusually sentimental for a comedy podcast, but that these old friends got to share this final moment of connection is no small thing. More

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      Betty White Recalled as a Trailblazer With a Love for Life

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      “The world looks a little different now,” said the actor Ryan Reynolds, who was one of many to pay tribute to the actress who died on Friday.Television stars, comedians, a president and seemingly the entire internet paid tribute on Friday to Betty White, the actress whose trailblazing career spanned seven decades and who died on Friday at her home in Los Angeles.President Biden said that Ms. White had “brought a smile to the lips of generations of Americans.”“She’s a cultural icon who will be sorely missed,” he wrote on Twitter. “Jill and I are thinking of her family and all those who loved her this New Year’s Eve.”The actor Ryan Reynolds, who co-starred with Ms. White in “The Proposal,” a 2009 romantic comedy, wrote on Instagram that “the world looks a little different now.”He said Ms. White had excelled at defying expectations.“She managed to grow very old and somehow, not old enough,” Mr. Reynolds wrote. “We’ll miss you, Betty. Now you know the secret.”Many paid tribute to Ms. White as a performer who had been ahead of her times, championing equity causes before they became popular.In 1954, Ms. White was criticized for having Arthur Duncan, a Black tap dancer, on her variety show, the account for the Martin Luther King Jr. Center wrote.“Her response: ‘I’m sorry. Live with it,’” the center wrote. “She then gave Duncan even more airtime. The show was canceled soon after. Rest well, Betty.”The journalist Dan Rather wrote that Ms. White had been beloved because she “embraced a life well lived.”“Her smile,” he wrote. “Her sense of humor. Her basic decency. Our world would be better if more followed her example. It is diminished with her passing.”The comedian Bob Saget called Ms. White “a remarkable talent” who was witty, kind, funny and “full of love,” especially for her husband.“She always said the love of her life was her husband, Allen Ludden,” who died in 1981, Mr. Saget wrote on Facebook. “Well, if things work out by Betty’s design — in the afterlife, they are reunited. I don’t know what happens when we die, but if Betty says you get to be with the love of your life, then I happily defer to Betty on this.”Mel Brooks, the actor and filmmaker, wrote on Twitter that it was “too bad we couldn’t get another ten years of her always warm, gracious, and witty personality.”The actor George Takei described Ms. White as a “national treasure,” adding, “A great loss to us all.”“Our Sue Ann Nivens, our beloved Rose Nylund, has joined the heavens to delight the stars with her inimitable style, humor and charm,” Mr. Takei wrote, referring to Ms. White’s roles on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “The Golden Girls.”He added in another tweet, “When midnight strikes tonight, let us all raise a toast to Betty.” More