When comedian Kenny DeForest made his late-night debut on Seth Meyers’s show in 2017, he opened his set with a joke about trying to quit smoking. “I don’t even think I’m addicted to cigarettes,” he said. “I think what I’m addicted to is always having, in my pocket, a reason to walk away from any conversation.” Six years later, he posted an unofficial sequel to this joke about returning to cigarettes to quit vaping. “It is actually better. I’ve done the research,” he said. “When it tastes like watermelon, you just do it in bed as soon as you wake up … I like cigarettes because I can’t smoke them in the shower.”

Watching DeForest’s comedy was an exercise in watching his physical and self-improvement journey play out over time. Whether he was unlearning toxic masculinity (the topic of his 2019 Late Late Show With James Corden set) overcoming his vices, or diving headfirst into therapy, DeForest was constantly striving to be a better person and churning his latest milestones and setbacks into material. On December 13, DeForest died as a result of injuries he sustained in an e-bike accident. He was 37. His two YouTube comedy specials — 2017’s B.A.D. Dreams and 2023’s Don’t You Know Who I Am? — live on as testaments to the remarkable progress he made.

DeForest’s onstage vibe was that of a good-natured bro. A font of plainspoken midwestern charm, he had a way of disarming audiences into seeing his introspective epiphanies as aspirational rather than heady: If he can figure out what’s wrong with himself, why can’t I? All the while, these epiphanies deepened the audience’s understanding of DeForest as a person and strengthened his comedy as a result.

Consider the way he talked about the end of his college-basketball career. After referencing it briefly in B.A.D. Dreams, he gets much more mileage out of the topic in Don’t You Know Who I Am? by digging into the profound effect that losing this outlet had on his life. “I couldn’t try to win basketball games anymore, so I started trying to win parties,” he jokes. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to win a party before, but it is the only way to lose a party.” This subject dovetailed nicely into Deforest’s material about drinking and cocaine addiction, another area through which he traced his personal progress between specials. “I think basketball was the reason I liked cocaine,” he says in his second special. “I spent my whole childhood getting chest bumps and shit. No one in adult life wants to do that — except for cocaine people. They love all kinds of bumps.”

Naturally, with so much of his material rooted in his therapy realizations, therapy itself was one of DeForest’s biggest muses. From a joke in his first special about calling himself a “pussy” in therapy, which prompted his therapist to mirror the same word back at him in order to reclaim its power (“For me, therapy has just become an hour of a 65-year-old Jewish man calling me a ‘pussy’ and then I give him $100”) to a joke in his second special about being diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, it was a topic he returned to over and over. In the wake of his death, the latter has been shared widely on Twitter by DeForest’s friends, fans, and peers. In it, DeForest compares the experience of having the disorder to having a brain that is a bad detective: “He looks at all the correct evidence and then just makes the wildly wrong conclusion. He comes in and he’s like, ‘All right, let’s take a look at this case. What do we have here? Interesting. It appears when you enter a room, people tend to react warmly. They’re often smiling and say nice things about you personally and professionally. Not to mention there’s always an outpouring of support when times get tough. Open and shut case here: Everybody hates you.’”

Given the number of people in the comedy community who have shared kind words about DeForest over the past several days, I imagine even the bad cop in DeForest’s brain would have struggled to draw the wrong conclusions about how beloved he was. Well wishes began pouring in on December 10 thanks to a GoFundMe page set up to raise money for an emergency surgery; the posts eventually turned into touching tributes following the news of his death. Comedian Joel Kim Booster referred to DeForest as “one of the most genuinely supportive, funny guys who always always always made me feel welcome in the boys club,” and in a long Instagram eulogy, James Adomian remembered him as someone who could “brighten any audience with a friendly accessibility and a joyfully honest point of view.” Though so much of DeForest’s comedy was about his quest to be a better person on- and offstage, endorsements like these prove he succeeded.

Kenny DeForest Was Always Getting Better