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?”

In the world of comedy, one question undergirds the darkest jokes: “Too soon?” The best bits — the jokes that make an audience gasp before dissolving into laughter — walk right up to the edge. Was it “too soon” to joke about Kenny? It turns out the answer, even for those who had gathered around his bed in an intensive care unit, was probably “no.”