What art truly is.

Bob Saget, Fairfax Media/Getty Images

Penn Jillette nails it. What is art? Well, yours truly is one and Jillette's take's spot on as it all about risk. Do you have the guts to reveal your innermost feelings to the world? When writing, one soon finds out there's no shield to hide behind like that of being a musician as I was one and the set of drums, I still have, was my shield when expressing my feelings to the world, Music's the most fun of all art forms IMHO, but this this blurb isn't about just music, it's about trust and bravery, something Bob Saget had in spades when telling "The Aristocrats" joke, the filthiest of all time, a joke expressing Carlin's 7 dirty words and then some.

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.

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.

Read Jillette's wonderful essay. You'll be glad you did.

As an aside, here's brief glimpse of what Jillette's The Aristocrats flick is all about.

For those of you who have not already put down your newspaper and rushed off to buy tickets (and I hereby authorize the advertising department at ThinkFilm to plaster the previous sentence wherever it likes), perhaps I should add that "The Aristocrats" is also possibly the filthiest, vilest, most extravagantly obscene documentary ever made. Visually, it is as tame as anything on PBS or VH1's "Behind the Music," but there is scarcely a minute of screen time that does not contain a reference to scatology, incest, bestiality and practices for which no euphemisms or Latinate names have been invented.

And while "The Aristocrats" is full of howlingly funny moments -- Kevin Pollak blending the joke with a Christopher Walken impression; Paul Reiser, Gilbert Gottfried and Bob Saget (yes, him) turning in notably disgusting renditions -- it works on the mind as well as the funny bone and the gag reflex. It makes you reflect on the mysteries of timing, context and delivery, those aspects of discipline that make comedy an art and separate the pros from the cocktail-party bores. It also takes you deep into the land of the id, not just of individual comedians (some of whom have pretty scary ids), but also into that murky collective terrain of desire, regression and fear where we all started out and where a few brave souls remain to make a living.

Taking the shot takes guts, right?

Jillette speaking at the Young Americans for Liberty National Convention in 2016