Mitch Hedberg was truly one of a kind. His nonchalant delivery of his unconventional jokes left us all rolling in the aisles. No one had a wit like Hedberg and no one has ever thought the way he did about life or about his craft. While Netflix and others are spending big money for stand-up acts, they'll never get one quite like Hedberg.
"An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience."
Mitch Hedberg's take on why escalators are never an inconvenience is pure gold. It's funny because it's both true and because we've all felt that annoyance at a broken escalator without really thinking about how they are really just stairs then. A perfect example of Hedberg's unique mind.
"Alcoholism is a disease, but it’s the only one you can get yelled at for having."
Poor Otto the alcoholic. If Otto had lupus, we wouldn't be angry with him. Again, the brilliant mind of Hedberg saying something both true and ridiculous when you scratch the surface a little bit.
"My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them."
Couldn't you just use fake water and think about watering them? I'm probably overthinking this. You have to wonder how many thoughts Hedberg had like this that never made it into his act.
"I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny."
Haven't we all been here with a thought in the night? It takes the insight of Mitch Hedberg to clarify how silly it must be to worry. Everything can be justified!
"I love blackjack. But I’m not addicted to gambling. I’m addicted to sitting in a semi-circle."
It's truly astounding how differently Mitch Hedberg looked at the world. I've played a lot of blackjack, but never thought about the shape of the table in quite that way. Maybe I'm just addicted to sitting in a semi-circle also?
"You know when they have a fishing show on TV? They catch the fish and then let it go. They don’t want to eat the fish, they just want to make it late for something."
Hedberg cared about the fish too. No one wants to be late, and getting caught and thrown back is torture for a fish that prides itself on promptness. Still better than being eaten though, I suppose.
"Fettucini alfredo is macaroni and cheese for adults."
I'm pretty sure I thought of this joke when I was about 12 years old and wanted to sound sophisticated. It still sounds way funnier with Hedberg's delivery than I could ever make it. He's definitely not wrong here.
"I like refried beans. That’s why I wanna try fried beans, because maybe they’re just as good and we’re just wasting time."
He made sure we would never think of food the same way again. How much time are we wasting, and are their shortcuts just as tasty? If you don't question everything you see, you'll never know, and thank goodness Hedberg was here to do the questioning for us.
"When someone hands you a flyer, it’s like they’re saying here you throw this away"
We've all thought fliers we're handed in the street are simply trash, but we've never put into words quite like this. Hedberg was so brilliant at twisting things just enough that it made it hilariously accurate, but unlike anything we'd ever heard before.
"Rice is great if you’re really hungry and want to eat two thousand of something."
It's jokes like this that make me wish you could order rice by the grain. Otherwise, I would still be thinking of it as by the cup, or by size, or whatever silly way we normies think of rice. Certainly not by the grain. We could do this with all kinds of food. Noodles, potato chips... the list is endless.
"This shirt is dry clean only. Which means… it’s dirty."
I have a lot of shirts like this too. Most are dirty. I don't have the time for drycleaning, nor did Mitch Hedberg.
"I don’t have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who’d be mad at me for saying that."
Sure, this is just a twist on the old Henny Youngman "take my wife, please," joke, but it works better for a whole new generation. Hedberg was the rare comedian who could do "joke jokes" like Youngman. Most tell funny stories, Hedberg tells jokes.
"Every time I go and shave, I assume there’s someone else on the planet shaving. So I say, ‘I’m gonna go shave, too.'"
Mitch Hedberg had a few jokes that followed this pattern. This one is the most universal though, because all people who shave should think this way, none of us are alone!
"I had a stick of CareFree gum, but it didn’t work. I felt pretty good while I was blowing that bubble, but as soon as the gum lost its flavor, I was back to pondering my mortality."
Advertising and marketing can be awfully deceptive, even when we don't think of it being that way. We think of a brand, Hedberg thinks of the meaning of the words. It's as insightful and as cutting as social commentary out there.
"I haven’t slept for ten days, because that would be too long."
There's a reason this joke has become a classic and once again, it's Hedberg seeing something in the words we use in a completely different way than we're used to. On the surface, it's not funny, it's just a fact, but the play on words makes it utterly brilliant.
"The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I’ll never be as good as a wall."
There are few people who can see the world in such a skewed way. It's very much like the mind of Karl Pilkington on the TV Show An Idiot Abroad. It's 100% accurate and yet, totally, pardon the pun, off the wall.
"I wanted to buy a candle holder, but the store didn’t have one. So I got a cake."
That unique way of thinking also solved a lot of problems. Cakes really are the most delicious candleholders, don't you think?
"I think animal crackers make people think that all animals taste the same."
This really is as simple as a joke gets, but once again, it's a look inside the twisted and beautiful mind of an unsung genius. Let's hope no one is out there eating circus animals, at least. Besides, they all taste the same, according to some research.
"This one commercial said, ‘Forget everything you know about slipcovers.’ So I did, and it was a load off of my mind."
Another brilliant example of Mitch Hedberg looking right through the marketing nonsense we are inundated with every day. For most people, a comment like "Forget everything you know about slipcovers," just washes over us without a second thought. It deserves this dissection though.
"I didn’t lose a leg in Vietnam just to serve you."
Even on the rare occasion that Mitch Hedberg showed up on TV shows, like an episode of That '70s Show, he still stuck with his own brand of humor. Playing a short-order cook, Hedberg has a conversation with Kelso (Ashton Kutcher) explaining that he "didn't lose a leg in Vietnam" to which Kelso replies that he still has both legs. Hedberg says, "Yeah, I didn't lose a leg."
"Man, you really like Tide…"
Very rarely were Hedberg's jokes more than a line or two, but sometimes he stretched them out. Like a jam by the Grateful Dead, there was more than just a riff. One classic involves car racing, and it doesn't fully pay off until the end, and even then, you have to think for a beat.
I want to be a race car passenger: just a guy who bugs the driver. Say, man, can I turn on the radio? You should slow down. Why do we gotta keep going in circles? Can I put my feet out the window? Man, you really like Tide...
“You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later.”
Here's something we would love to do, just skip to the part of life where our dreams are headed. Hopefully in his life, Hedberg made it to where his dreams hoped he would.
"I bought a donut and they gave me a receipt for the donut..."
Absolutely no one needs a receipt for one donut. Most of us would just shove the unnecessary paper into our pocket and forget about it until we got home and threw it away at the end of the day. Not Mitch Hedberg. He saw everything in life as potential for his act. Simply getting a silly receipt was enough for him to come up with one of his all-time best jokes. It's also one of his longer jokes and one he chose to use on the underrated (and not streaming anywhere) Dr. Katz.
I bought a donut and they gave me a receipt for the donut; I don't need a receipt for the donut. I'll just give you the money, and you give me the donut, end of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this. I just can't imagine a scenario where I would have to prove that I bought a donut.
"I order the club sandwich all the time, but I'm not even a member, man. I don't know how I get away with it."
I'd never worried about being a member of a club when ordering my favorite sandwich, but after hearing this joke, I felt proud to member of the "club club" that no one has to be a member of. And I LOVE frilly toothpicks, just like the comedian.
“My belt holds up my pants and my pants have belt loops that hold up the belt. Who is the real hero?”
The Zen philosopher Hakuin Ekaku once wondered what was the sound of one hand clapping. Mitch Hedberg does the thinker one better and asks what's more important, the belt or the belt loops? There is no way to ever know the answer to the question, yet one can ponder it all day.
“I got a king-sized bed. I don't know any kings, but if one came over, I guess he'd be comfortable. Oh, you're a king you say? Well, you won't believe what I have in store for you! It's to your exact specifications! ”
Somewhere in the back of a Miss Manners book surely this advice has been added. It would be embarrassing for a king to show up and for you to only have a queen-sized bed. Or to have twins over and the same thing to happen.
“When I was a boy, I laid in my twin-sized bed and wondered where my brother was.”
Much like a king, you have to wonder why so many of us grew up sleeping in a twin-sized bed, but didn't have a twin. Was our twin adopted? Was there ever a twin at all? Even at a young age, Hedberg's mind was hitting differently than the rest of us.
“I think Bigfoot is blurry, that's the problem. It's not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that's extra scary to me. There's a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.”
The comedian makes a good point here. Maybe we've all been thinking about this wrong. It's so simple.
"The Dufrenes are in someone’s trunk right now, with duct tape over their mouths. And they’re hungry.”
All because he heard a name on the loud speaker at a restaurant for a family that didn't show up for their table. It's a deep look into his mind, that's for sure.
On a traffic light green means ‘go’ and yellow means ‘yield’, but on a banana, it’s just the opposite. Green means ‘hold on,’ yellow means ‘go ahead,’ and red means, ‘where the hell did you get that banana at?’
No one, no one in the world, has ever thought about bananas like this. Ever.
“I’ve never stayed at a bed and breakfast, because I don’t think I would, ’cause I figure, you stay at a bed and breakfast, by the end of the day, you start to get hungry. "Is that all you got around here? You need to direct me to a Chair, Lunch, Dinner."
Now I feel like I'm getting ripped off at B&Bs.
Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus, or just a really cool Opotamus?
And what kind of comedian was Mitch Hedberg? The hippest and coolest.
Through it all, almost all of Mitch Hedberg's most hilarious jokes were jokes that most comedians could never pull off, not in a million different Netflix specials. Nothing off-color, nothing political, nothing but clean, simple thoughts that only a brilliant person could ever conceive of.
