Wealth & Money Quote by Bob Saget

Nostalgia does a sneaky bit of gatekeeping here: Saget is remembering a time when being a working comic wasn’t synonymous with being a brand, but with being a survivor. The numbers (25, 30 years ago) aren’t just timestamps; they’re a way of establishing authority and loss, like he’s testifying from the before-times of comedy’s current content-industrial complex. “That meant something” is doing heavy lifting, implying that today’s markers of success are softer, more inflated, or at least less earned.

What makes the passage work is the blunt, almost unglamorous specificity. “Making some money” sets the bar low, but real. It suggests a scene where the payoff wasn’t fame, it was rent. Then he pivots to the craft as a kind of labor: “screaming at the audience” and “crowd control” frames comedy less as artful monologue and more as live-event management. It’s a demystification that also doubles as respect: the comics he’s talking about weren’t just telling jokes, they were handling rooms that could turn hostile, drunk, or distracted. The job required dominance, stamina, and nerves.

The mention of “the whole urban comedy scene” is loaded without being unpacked. It nods to a parallel ecosystem - frequently Black-led, often higher energy, more interactive, and historically under-credited by mainstream comedy narratives. Saget’s phrasing hints at both fascination and distance, acknowledging a movement that changed the texture of American stand-up while also revealing how comedy was segregated by venues, audiences, and industry pathways. Subtext: the scene evolved, but so did who gets to define what “meant something.”