He spent years weaponizing his own unraveling, turning every panic into a story we could survive inside for a few minutes. Onstage, he stripped his fears down to the bone, not to impress us, but to prove that naming the monster made it smaller, if only for the length of a set. We laughed because we recognized ourselves in the tremor of his voice, in the way he circled the same dread until it finally let go.

Now that the stage is empty, the silence feels like a missing line we keep reaching for. Yet what remains is not the absence of a final joke, but the echo of his permission: to be unsure, to be frightened, to keep talking anyway. His legacy isn’t a neatly landed bit; it’s the courage to stand in the light with shaking hands and say, “Me too,” and mean it.