Bob Saget and Norm Macdonald’s enduring friendship
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By Lisa Respers France, CNN
Bob Saget and Norm Macdonald first met working standup in the Ottawa comedy clubs before they became big stars.
Now they are being remembered in death just months apart.
Video of Macdonald roasting Saget on Comedy Central back in 2008 began circulating on social media Sunday, following the unexpected death of Saget at the age of 65. Macdonald died in September of cancer.
Macdonald did a “clean” roast of Saget, poking fun at his looks (“Bob has a beautiful face, like a flower. Yeah, a cauliflower” to his lack of sports knowledge (“He thinks that the Kentucky Derby is a hat and not a horse race that they race every year”).
But the former “Saturday Nigh Live” cast member made Saget visibly emotional at the end of his remarks when he shared that Saget was the first comedian he ever saw perform live and that he loved him.
“Bob honestly has never had an unkind word for anybody,” Macdonald said. “I love him and I hope everybody else does. I just wanted to say that.”
The feeling was mutual.
Shortly after MacDonald’s death, Saget shared a deeply personal and emotional tribute to the late comedian.
The “Fuller House” star said MacDonald chose to do an insult-free routine at the roast because he said “I can’t say mean things about you because you’re my friend.”
Losing Macdonald felt like “a knife in the heart for all of us who were close to him and all of you who loved him,” Saget said at the time.
“Last week, I got a text and it just said ‘I love you.’ And I didn’t say much back,” Saget recalled. “I just said, ‘I love you Norm.’ And that was my [final] communication with him. … One of the gifts of my life is that he loved me, and that I loved him.”
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