“I’ll die young, but it’s like kissing God.” – Lenny Bruce, on his heroin addiction
“The club owner here, when you come to town, he hooks you up with drugs, like he’ll give you cocaine or pot brownies. But last time I was in town, he gave me a drug for attention deficit disorder, because he’s afflicted. But I’m not. So what happened to me was that I suddenly had an extralong attention span. People would be telling me a story, and then the story would end and I’d get all mad and shit. ‘C’mon, man, there’s gotta be more to that story. I’m on pills here.'” – Mitch Hedberg, Strategic Grill Locations
Forget that Mitch Hedberg OD’d on March 29, 2005. Everybody dies, especially comedians. They die young, tragically, with a lifetime’s worth of soul-soothing mirth incomplete and undone. But that’s that. Focus on what’s left, what’s important.
The two most important things to know about the late stand-up comedian Mitch Hedberg are: 1) His routines stand absurdly strong and ludicrously, contagiously hilarious 4½ years after his death, and 2) he has the power to alter your speech patterns from beyond the grave. No joke.
Let me explain. Maybe you shell out for one of three CDs – Strategic Grill Locations (1999), Mitch All Together (2003), or last year’s Do You Believe in Gosh? – or download an MP3 file or catch an old episode of Adult Swim’s Dr. Katz or Home Movies featuring a Hedberg cameo. Wherever or however you first encounter the stonily casual cadence of Hedberg’s borderline surrealist stand-up, you will, consciously or not, end up mimicking his meter, which trips and drips off the tongue like a Miles Davis solo punctuated by sudden pauses, seemingly misplaced accentuations, and shiny little outbursts of non sequitur observations. His flow is unique in the history of stand-up, and newcomers to Hedberg pick up on it immediately and then incorporate it into their own speech patterns … for a while. Every pause-laden sentence fragment out of their mouths, no matter how banal, becomes Mitchified. I’ve heard it. I’ve done it. It’s viral, and there’s no known cure.
“I haven’t slept for 10 days because … that would be too long.” – Mitch Hedberg, Strategic Grill Locations
We should all be so lucky. Hedberg’s star was ascendant when he passed, but the crazy-cool thing of it all is that his career hasn’t even come close to reaching its apogee – more like it’s just burning off the initial thrusters. Austin’s late, great Bill Hicks had a similar pre- and posthumous career arc, but the similarities end there. Hicks raged against the machine, stretching toward his own personal utopian vision via comedy. Hedberg, who in live footage can be seen doing just about anything to avoid eye-contact with the audience, looks and acts and sounds about as capable of rage as Jeff Spicoli: Slow Times at Hedberg High. (Notably, the comic had small roles in two semiclassic laid-back cinematics: Lords of Dogtown and Almost Famous. That last one just kills you, doesn’t it?)
Relax. Chill. Help is on the way in the form of Lynn Shawcroft, Hedberg’s widow and fellow comic, who arrives at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz this Sunday and Monday for the Mitch Hedberg Tribute Show, which will include a screening of Hedberg’s directorial debut feature, Los Enchiladas!; the unseen pilot for a Hedberg MTV series; and enough new nuggets of Mitchnicity to satisfy even the most Hedberg-hungry among us. And for you newcomers, you Mitch Hedberg virgins? You’re gonna be talking weird for a couple of weeks.
So why a Hedberg tribute now?
“The idea for this really came about because of the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles,” Shawcroft explains. “They play a huge range of movies, and they were having a month dedicated to comedy and comedians. People like Patton Oswalt and Sarah Silverman were showing some of their favorite movies, and they contacted me about doing a Mitch Hedberg night. Mitch had written, directed, and starred in a movie in 1998, which had subsequently gone to Sundance in 1999, called Los Enchiladas!, and since I also had some other little bits of footage to show as well as a television pilot, it went really well, and here we are.”
A snippet or two of Los Enchiladas! can be found by scouring the Web, but the duration of the film remains unknown, mostly, to fans, including this one. Asked to describe the film – the idea of the painfully shy Hedberg starring as the main character in a movie of his own devising is still hard to fathom – Shawcroft explains: “He made it with his ex-girlfriend and some of his friends using his own money. He had been trying to secure a release for it, but when he took it to Sundance he was pretty unknown at that time, so he kind of set it aside to focus more on stand-up comedy.
“Mitch was originally from the Midwest. He’d left the house at 18, and all he’d really done before he became a comedian was be a cook. He’d worked at Chili’s, and he’d worked at this Mexican restaurant in the Midwest, this kind of shitty, inauthentic, cheese-on-top-of-everything-type Mexican restaurant. So he drew from his experiences working at the restaurant, and it’s set on the day before Cinco de Mayo. [The storyline] is pretty simple, but now that people know Mitch and know his kind of comedy, there’s a lot of moments in there that people are going to find really funny just because it’s Mitch. Dave Attell, Marc Maron, and Todd Barry are all in it.”
Despite the fact (or maybe, in part, because of it) that Hedberg’s demise was so unexpected, his popularity continues to soar, especially online through the postings and Tweets of a newer, largely teenage fanbase that’s growing by the hour.
“He’s not as well known as he would have been,” admits Shawcroft, “and he didn’t put out anywhere near as much as he was capable of, but the way he’s getting well-known right now [via the Internet] is spreading organically. He didn’t even have a MySpace account [when he was alive], but if you go into Twitter and Tweet his name, he’s being quoted all the time.
“When you’re starting out in stand-up comedy,” continues Shawcroft, “it takes, like, 10 years to build your first 45 minutes. Mitch would go to Target cafeterias and sit and write all day. But that’s how you learn your own style.”
“I tried to walk into Target, but I missed. I think the entrance to Target should have a whole lot of people splattered all around. Then when I finally walk in the guy says, ‘Can I help you?’ ‘Just practicing.'” – Mitch Hedberg, Strategic Grill Locations
So, yeah, Mitch Hedberg’s not around anymore, but there’s plenty of unreleased material to come – and plenty of released material out there to discover. Whimsical, observational humor that sneaks up on you, peering out from under the aviator shades and long blond hair of the ghost of Mitches past.
Shawcroft: “People always say that comedy has this tragic side to it and the life of a comedian is really, really hard, and that’s true. But Mitch loved that life. You get to live a kind of outlaw life on some level, you know what I mean? It’s really hard in the beginning. You don’t make any money, and you’re constantly on the move. But then you do start to make money, and you have all this freedom. You can travel around in a huge motor home, you can have a cabin, you don’t have an alarm clock, you get to write, you get to drink on the job, stay up late, keep your hair long. That’s what it is, and that’s what Mitch loved.
“He also loved soft tacos and Alien vs. Predator. But, you know, Mitch lived his life and did what he wanted to do the way he wanted to do it. The only sad part is we know how it ended.”
The Mitch Hedberg Tribute Show with Lynn Shawcroft takes place Sunday, Oct. 11, and Monday, Oct. 12, at the Alamo Drafthouse at the Ritz. For more info, see www.originalalamo.com.
This article appears in October 9 • 2009.