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Penn Jillette: It’s Been Four Years Since My Friend Died. I Still Love Him.

Mr. Jillette is a magician and a comedian. He produced the 2005 documentary “The Aristocrats.”

As part of a series marking 175 years of eyewitness journalism, Times Opinion asked writers to revisit previously published articles. In 2022, Penn Jillette wrote about losing his friend, Bob Saget. Below, he annotates his original essay.

The Sublime Beauty of My Friend Bob Saget’s Filthy Comedy (2022)

My children are teenagers, ages 15 and 16, and they know the comic Bob Saget was my friend. They know he died earlier this week, and that I’m grieving. They want to comfort me. But when they saw clips of Bob on the internet, making hard-core jokes about pedophilia and incest, they were offended. They thought my friend must have been a bad person, and it was hard for them to understand how I could have loved him.

I don’t know if I can blame them. How could they understand that doing transgressive comedy was, in Bob’s hands, not about hate and pain but, rather, a daredevil act of mutual trust?

We now consume much of our art in bite-size chunks, sometimes just seconds of video stripped of context: the message without the messenger. When my children watched little snippets of Bob and read some quotes, they couldn’t know that Bob Saget didn’t do transgressive comedy to be mean. He didn’t even do it to shock. He did it to make people laugh, to test himself, to let the audience test him and to form a connection with them.

He had a big smile and joy for the world in “Full House” and on “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Everyone loved and trusted Bob in those roles. You wanted to hug him.

Some people are saying now that the real Bob was very different from that good-guy image, but I disagree. Offstage he was loving, kind, open, funny, a great friend and a great father. He also told filthy, disgusting, offensive jokes.

What Bob Saget practiced was emotional stage diving. He would fall face-first into the audience’s arms. If the audience didn’t trust him enough to catch him with their laughs, it would be worse than smashing onto a concrete floor.

The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg understood that this kind of gamble was intrinsic to great art. He is said to have said, “The poet always stands naked before the world.” I think there’s more to it. The artist must bravely say, “I am going to show the world who I am, and I trust that someone will understand.”

Real art, beautiful art, is always a scary act of trust. We look to art to see another person’s heart. That human connection is all that matters. For me, it is a reason to live.

I first got to know Bob when we were shooting “The Aristocrats,” an arty documentary from 2005 where we recorded comics telling the filthiest version they could of an inside comedy joke. It was a joke that comics loved — Johnny Carson was a big fan — but was never told to the public. It was meant for other comedians — siblings who understood the fun challenge of pushing boundaries while keeping trust.

We recorded Bob backstage at a comedy club right before he went on for his set. The director, Paul Provenza, and I had told Bob that we were comparing comedy improvisation to jazz improvisation. We hear musicians improvise solos over the same chord changes, and we wanted to watch comedians improvise over the same joke. We were shooting with home equipment and didn’t know if the movie would ever come out for the public. We thought it might just be a document for the 100-plus people who were in it.

Before we started rolling, Bob said, “Who do I have to beat?” He meant, who had been the most outrageous so far? “George? Robin?” he asked. We said that yes, George Carlin and Robin Williams had taken it pretty far out, but the ones he should be gunning for were Gilbert Gottfried and Carrie Fisher. Bob said, “OK.” He inhaled a deep breath and took off.

Oh, my goodness gracious! There wasn’t a taboo that Bob didn’t roll around in. His........

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