Why I love Mitch Hedberg

Tribute to a legend

If you could have dinner with anyone—dead or alive—who would it be?

I’d pick Mitch Hedberg.

Mitch was a comedian, but it’s more accurate to say he was a pioneer.

Mitch didn’t get on stage and go on hour long tirades. He got on stage—likely with a pair of sunglasses—and told you a one-liner. Then another one. Then another one. Then another one until he was done or your stomach hurt from laughing, whichever came first.

If you’ve never heard of him and think I’m praising just some other comic you’re mistaken. He was different. Take a few minutes out of your needlessly busy day to watch this:

(if you don’t watch this then the last line of this article is going to sound dumb and you’ll unsubscribe and nobody wants that)

If you didn’t enjoy that please meet with a psychiatrist near you.

The unenlightened will say his jokes were “dumb”. They’re idiots. If you listen closer to Mitch, you hear someone who paid attention to the world. He saw things that everyone missed. Mitch found amusement in everyday things and called out stupidity on the nose.

Some of my favorite Mitch lines:

I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.

I don't have a girlfriend, but I know a woman who would get really angry if she heard me say that.

Alcoholism is a disease, but it’s the only one you can get yelled at for having.

I want to hang a map of the world in my house, and then I’m gonna put pins into all the locations that I’ve traveled to. But first I’m gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map, so it won’t fall down.

I love Mitch because he showed me—as the audience—what comedy really can be. It doesn’t have to make you tense. It doesn’t make you think the comedian is a daredevil for saying something taboo. It doesn’t need to rely on your beliefs being one thing so you can gawk at the absurdity of something else. All of that can be funny, but comedy can just be. You can see the world and think something’s funky, point it out, and make someone laugh. Mitch boiled down comedy for me in a way that nobody else has. He had clarity of thought, and, more importantly, simplicity of expression.

The cadence of his speech told you where to look for the joke. The ups and downs of his syllable emphasis kept you alert. He stretched and shortened words to pick up the pace or slow things down when you needed to pay attention. He mastered something so instinctual that nobody bothered to look. The audience assumed that this is how it ought to be done, but nobody bothered to check whether it actually was.

He didn’t let his severe stage fright stop him from performing. If you watch enough of his performances you can see him shaking from anxiety. His iconic sunglasses were a product of all that too; he usually looked nervously down towards the ground when he was on stage.

He was brilliant. He was special. And, since his untimely passing in 2005, at the age of 37, there’s been nobody like him.

Look on his Wikipedia page and the Greats were his fans: George Carlin, Dave Chappelle, Norm Macdonald. Today, his jokes live on through Youtube and podcasts where comedians reminisce about their old friend.

Despite these online relics, chances are you most likely saw Mitch at the store.