Mitch Hedberg died 10 years ago today. His drug-induced death looms over most conversations about his career. That's not uncommon. There's a familiar ease with which we flock to the young, brilliant and dead. They leave behind finite bodies of work to study, never getting old and corny, never making that bad album or that desperate movie. Their goodness is generally preserved. When an artists dies young, he or she enters history where they can subsequently be measured and compared.
And, shit, I almost fell into that trap, framing Hedberg only as a cult figure, a tragic hero. I even thought of the obvious grand comparison: Mitch Hedberg as the Kurt Cobain of comedy. It's not too hard an analogy to make—the subtle satires, the reluctant genius hiding behind greasy strands of long blond hair, the heroin. I would click on that headline. But it wouldn't be accurate.
Dying didn't make Hedberg transcendent. Even now, when people have listened to 400 episodes of WTF and know more than ever about the craft and art of stand-up comedy, Hedberg fandom is still relatively niche. He wasn't a massive cultural force, never broke into the mainstream or landed a major pilot or movie role. He was just really fucking funny. That's a bit harder to explain.
A Hedberg joke is deceptive. The structures vary, but the result is usually the same: Mitch sees something in the mundane and relatable—a vending machine or a Subway restaurant—something so obvious we're amazed we hadn't noticed it that way before. It might take a second to consider, but then we chuckle. They're the types of jokes that make you turn to your friends, studying their faces to see if they got it too.
"I like vending machines because snacks are better when they fall." The setup alone as complete as many Hedberg jokes. "If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes I will drop it, so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential."
And then he moves on. If that joke missed your funny bone, there's no time to linger. It's on to the next setup, the next anecdote about juggling or rabbits or rice.
A vulnerable self-awareness is hard to achieve as a one or two-line joke teller. Comedians who tell painful personal anecdotes, and there are many great examples, are inevitably vulnerable. Hedberg didn't do narrative. His longest stream of connected jokes might be a three joke arc about ducks or two jokes about an ant farm. It's hard to be vulnerable in a one liner about about sandwiches.
"I find that a duck's opinion of me is very much influenced by whether or not I have bread."
But Hedberg exposed himself with brief, self-aware asides, mumbling, "That joke is ridiculous," after a misfired punchline.
The jokes never got too personal. A few about drug use and dating might hint at his personal struggles, but it was the pace and cadence of his jokes that challenged audiences, almost disregarding completely whether or not they got it before moving quickly to another scenario, another abrupt punchline either way. Hedberg asked a lot of the audience and he rarely, if ever, received those hearty, mainstream roars of applause.
"That joke was funnier than you acted," he adds after a so-so reception, getting more laughs than the joke itself. He learned to parry audiences early. The battle was constant, with the nature of his jokes and the audiences ability to appreciate them.
That's how Mitch will be remembered, as a brilliant everyday observationalist. But truthfully, he'll probably eventually be forgotten. Hit songs and movies resonate for decades. Hedberg never got there.
In this early Hedberg set from 1995, intro'd by a vaguely coherent skit about cereal (one of his favorite topics) Mitch walks on stage saying, "Okay, not a lot of people laughed at that shit, but that's alright." He goes on to do his routine, which includes the roots of a few famous Hedberg jokes, to a thoroughly unimpressed and unresponsive audience.
That was early. Hedberg's comic timing and his punctuating delivery weren't set yet. By the time he got one of his first big breaks in 1999, a solo set on the half hour Comedy Central Presents, the foundations of modern Mitch had been established. If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, the insightful short doc Mitch Was A Writer shows how Hedberg crafted his tight, seemingly simple jokes.
The Comedy Central special was the first time many people saw Hedberg and he struggled.
The 22-minute television edit moves smoothly enough, with commercial breaks covering awkward transitions, mistimed jokes cut completely from the show. But the full 37-minute set is online and it was anything but smooth. Hedberg is characteristically fidgety. That wasn't unusual for him, but as the jokes continue to miss, he gets more and more frustrated. At one point he asks a group in the front of the crowd, "You didn't get that joke?" Three-quarters of the way through the taping, he sits on the stairs near the back of the stage. "This is my special," he says, looking down and running his hands through his hair. "Can't you see how happy I am?"
But towards the end of the show, he swings back to some of his older jokes, some a bit more obvious and broad, and the applause begins to pick up. Hedberg bathes in the acceptance, reeling off more and more jokes, lingering awkwardly too long onstage, hungering for the upswing.
You can dig through the digital crates and find many more examples of his struggles and triumphs. Such is the nature of stand-up. But for me, the truest Hedberg comes from his two main albums. The first, Strategic Grill Locations, I listened to while it downloaded on Limewire or Kazaa Lite, jokes chasing the slowly loading green status bar as my friend, my mom and I sat around the computer laughing our asses off.
Hedberg left us before the Internet truly took hold of comedy. A whole host of comedians have made their bones in the Twitter era and it's easy to imagine Hedberg's bite-sized jokes fitting perfectly into today's 140 character world. But Twitter has created a wealth of issues for comedians like rampant joke stealing and the pressure to constantly be funny online while simultaneously preserving their best work for the stage. The amount of acceptance Hedberg seemed to need combined with the amount of digital vitriol hurled at comedians may have been a toxic combination.
I'd like to think his career would have continued along an upward trajectory. In a clip at the beginning of Mitch Was A Writer, Hedberg says simply, wonderously, "Just having your thoughts laughed at is pretty amazing." It is, obviously, but sadly that wasn't enough for Hedberg.
He has made posthumous forays into the world of clickbait though. Last year, on the anniversary of his death, BuzzFeed published a ranking of 275 of his jokes. There are few comedians with enough material to fill such a list, and still the comments were full of fans lamenting the absence of their favorite quip.
I'm sure a few purists would take issue with such a list, but Hedberg had mainstream aspirations. As cultish as his persona has become since his death, his jokes were general on purpose. He made people laugh about Pringles. He was a craftsman, for sure, but there was nothing highbrow in his approach. Hedberg was a pop artist.
And I appreciate him as such, quoting his jokes the same way I quote Seinfeld or The Simpsons, texting friends when an everyday occurrence brings Mitch to mind.
That's how Mitch will be remembered, as a brilliant everyday observationalist. But truthfully, he'll probably eventually be forgotten. Hit songs and movies resonate for decades. Hedberg never got there. His own weakness is partially to blame, as was our slowness to appreciate his style. But for those of us who found his work at just the right time, Hedberg will be hard to let go of. Ten years out and I still frequent my YouTube favorites and tweet my favorite quotes. It seems a small penance to pay to an artist who delivered so many good times to so many stoned kids like some magical pizza guy, a vending machine stocked with snack-sized laughs.
Angelo Spagnolo is a writer living in New York. You can follow him on Twitter here.
