I jumped on the satellite radio bandwagon early on when I activated an XM subscription in 2002. I enjoyed it enough that I let it continue for about 5 years. I was especially impressed by the fact that I received a flawless signal from a hotel nestled at the base of a steep cliff in Yosemite National Park during a trip in Summer, 2003. Also, the ability to listen to some obscure electronica just a few dial twists from another channel which might simultaneously be playing forgotten Country standards from the era of Hank Williams (that would describe my span of musical tastes, literally) was a strong draw. It took the 2007-2008 WGA strike and its threat to my job in the entertainment industry to scare me off from superfluous spending permanently, which included, amongst other austere cutbacks, the cancellation of my XM Radio subscription.
Despite the many music, talk and news selections lined up throughout XM’s lineup, some of my favorite spots were the comedy channels. XM’s practice was to play very short bits from assorted stand up performances, and in this way, I learned the names and comedic style of comedians I’d never heard of, the most notable being Mitch Hedberg.
This dude hooked me completely.
His brand of comedy was tailor made for my unorthodox sense of humor and comic temperament. Hedberg’s humor was sly and indirect and subsisted on one’s ability to suspend common logic patterns (or sense?) inherent in everyday spoken language.
This Wiki entry attributes to Hedberg’s comedy an element of “surreal humor,” amongst other things. I’d never thought of that phrase, and even now I’m not particularly clear what it denotes. But still, I have to agree…there is an element of his humor that is surrreal.
Surreal in the respect that its effect on your ability to understand his humor, as I said, requires you to lift all sense of linearity and surface logic. His observational ruminations detailing and mocking the nuances of human expression and accepted, pervasive understandings were priceless.
He was a dissolute hippy who spoke in a laid back, laconic manner; he suggested observations to you, the listener, and pointed out the futility of your earthbound interpretations. He left it up to you. It was your audience-like mission to complete the comedic circle in your own mind at which point you would guffaw and shake your head.
He was a quiet comic.
He didn’t use yelling or shouting as a mechanism whereby he might prop his jokes up on a pedestal so the audience would recognize the laugh cue, to be instructed that the joke was supposed to be funny. Now.
Hedberg gave his fans more credit than that.
He was not for everyone.
As with most creative geniuses, he was spellbound by inner demons and dealt with them in a typically chemically abusive manner whereby he sought comfort in drugs and alcohol. I’ve seen clips where his performances were clearly marred by altered consciousness. Some others shows him appearing puffy. Later he took to wearing thick, dark sunglasses which you sense perhaps acted as motherly shield from the ruthlessly demanding nature of his stage business.
The inner demons man. They will impale a man of genius like Hedberg, and they did in the form of a speedball which killed him in his New Jersey hotel room on March 30, 2005. I vaguely remember the news item. I’d recently discovered Hedberg on XM, and little did I know that I, the decidedly non-genius penning this post, who was also in the midst of battling chemical demons at the time, would come very close to dying just over three months after Hedberg.
I wonder what would have become of this man if he still lived. One of my dreams was to see him perform live but alas, not to happen.
This video contains 2 clips from the annual Montreal comedy festival, “Just For Laughs.” The first is from Hedberg’s 1998 performance and the second is from his 2004 performance, just a year before his death.
[...] Mitch Hedberg, a comedic genius cut short [...]