What’s So Funny About a Dead Comedian? What’s So Funny About a Dead Comedian?

Kenny DeForest was beloved among his fellow stand-ups. After his sudden death, they came together to grieve — and to confront comedy’s eternal question: Too soon?

A few weeks after Kenny DeForest died, a group of his friends gathered in an apartment in Los Angeles. The mood was somber — Mr. DeForest was only 37, and he had died from traumatic brain injuries after falling off an electric bike in Brooklyn.

But Mr. DeForest was a professional comedian, and his friends were all comedians, and any gathering of comedians eventually comes to feel like a party.

They were playing a game where everybody gets a card with a single word and then gives clues to help their teammates guess the word.

Will Miles, one of Mr. DeForest’s best friends, plucked a card from the deck. He read it and immediately said, “Kenny should have worn a … ”

His teammates gasped then blurted out the answer in unison: “Helmet!”

“So we did win,” Mr. Miles recalled a few weeks after the party. Then he pivoted to a bracingly dark punchline: “But at what cost?”