One observation I’m glad I was able to share with Britt while he was here: I never saw him just tell a joke. Britt required himself to invent an entirely new genre of humor, and then to present an example of that new genre as a joke — or as a relentless multi-month program of connected jokes, or a comedic world populated by co-conspirators and shanghai-ed foils.

This morning I realized Britt did something similar with friendships. He was never just friends with someone. He invented an entirely new form of friendship for every person he knew.

I think this is why so many of us are left with such precisely cut (as Harris said) “Britt-shaped holes”. It is also why nobody could know him entirely: There was just too much Britt to know. He streamed out too far and too weirdly into too many other people, and he never stopped inventing and changing long enough for anyone to comprehend it.

Here’s a selection of Britt humor: