Ms. Whang moved to Los Angeles in 1998 to pursue a career in show business. The daughter of a Navy engineer who moved the family frequently, she was determined to keep friendships throughout adulthood.

“Suzanne is the kind of human being who will spoon-feed you when you are a mess,” the actress Vanessa Marcil, who worked with Ms. Whang on “Las Vegas,” told The New York Times in 2013, when Ms. Whang married her second husband, Jay Nickerson. (The pair filed for divorce in 2015, according to court records. )

On set and beyond, Ms. Whang developed a reputation as an exceptionally positive person. In the fall of 2006, when she learned that she had breast cancer, she said she told the doctor, “This will be great material for my act.”

Though at first she was private about the diagnosis, she eventually did precisely that, incorporating her health problems in her stand-up routine. She credited her paternal grandfather, a prominent Presbyterian leader in Washington, with teaching her how to incorporate comedy into unlikely topics. People would tell him that church was not funny, she told the The New York Times in 2013, and he would remind her that without humor, people would fall asleep.

Five years after her diagnosis, doctors told her she was free of cancer. But it returned last October, according to Mr. Culbertson, who represented her for nearly 25 years.