Mitch Hedberg - Coolest Comedian Ever?

Image via youtube.com

Mitch Hedberg died of a drug overdose seven years ago today. He was one of the hippest and most original voices ever to grace the world of comedy. My personal appreciation of his unique (and drug-enhanced) talents was certainly influenced by my own experimentation with the demon weed and other recreational drugs while in college, which was when Mitch first began to gain national attention on Letterman and Comedy Central.

I remember being utterly captivated by his scruffy appearance and nonchalant delivery while watching him perform. The sunglasses, the long hair drooping down over his eyes, the rocking from side-to-side, foot-to-foot. Then there was that laconic drawl. Was it southern, was it stoner, was it a co-opting of some sort of African-American dialect? Or was it just "Mitch being Mitch"? He sounded like that quirky but impossibly cool outsider dude in high school who hovers at the periphery of various social circles but refuses to fully join any single one.


The lenses of his sunglasses were tinted, but not dark enough to not see that his eyes were focused on the floor for the majority of his set. Mitch did not seem to be concerned about engaging the audience. He let his jokes stand on their own. Sometimes they fell flat, and his habit of commenting on them, of acknowledging their mediocrity, was his way of endearing himself to the audience. 

But the jokes rarely bombed. They usually consisted of simple statements or observations, often dealing with the literal versus the figurative meaning of things. The payoffs were immediate, and in rapid succession, exactly how we want it in this age of the shortened attention span. Mitch's delivery was simple: Here's a joke. Here's another joke. Here's the next joke. His was not an act carefully honed and obsessively fine-tuned through years of touring small clubs. As he says at the beginning of the clip below, he sat in a hotel at night, thought of something funny, then got a pen and wrote it down (or not, probably depending on how stoned or strung out he was).

There was no artifice with Mitch. Do you think he spent hours in that same hotel room standing in front of the bathroom mirror and practicing his delivery? Rhetorical question aside, his honesty allowed him to disarm his audience. He made them forget about being impressed and let them focus on laughing. Tell the jokes and get the hell off the stage. No segways, no interaction, no nuance, no nonsense.

I suppose one cold argue that it was all nonsense, in a way. Once could argue that Mitch's "schtick" was just the bizarre ramblings of a spaced out drug addict. That may be the case, but that doesn't take away the fact that they were still funny. The ability to mine the observations of his drug-addled brain was an inherent part of Mitch's being. It was a genuine talent that cannot simply be dismissed as "the drugs talking".

I can just picture him in that hotel room, lying on the bed, watching infomercials, not moving, while his mind fires off thought after thought, observation after observation, analyzing each for potential humor, calculating the joke potential, determining whether to tell his body to get up and go find that pen. 

Check out the Letterman clip and appreciate a man who died too soon to ever be fully appreciated. Hopefully Mitch is sitting by a pond somewhere with a loaf of bread, chillin' with the ducks.