Speaker 1: Kalaroga Shark Media. Hello, I'm Johnny Mack with your daily
Speaker 1: comedy news. There's been talk of the Hebburg Gassans had
Speaker 1: burchase Sons. Anyway, Mitch Hedberg's name has been around a
Speaker 1: lot more lately than it had been in the past
Speaker 1: few years, so I thought I would do today is
Speaker 1: just off if you listen to all fifteen sixteen hundred
Speaker 1: episodes of this podcast, this is for you as a rerun.
Speaker 1: But you know, new listeners come and old listeners go.
Speaker 1: So what I've done here is over the years, I've
Speaker 1: sold a few lengthy Mitch Hedberg related anecdotes and I've
Speaker 1: put them together to make it today's episode, which is
Speaker 1: all about Mitch Hebburg. So one thing I can tell
Speaker 1: you is I know exactly where I was on March
Speaker 1: thirty first, two thousand and five. Here's why. I was
Speaker 1: at the New York City Javit Center doing an episode
Speaker 1: of Jim Brewers radio show for Sirius XAM. We were
Speaker 1: broadcasting from the car Show and Jim was in a
Speaker 1: bad mood because the night before Jim was doing a
Speaker 1: concert with Mitch Hedburg and Mitch did not show up,
Speaker 1: and Jim was kind of annoyed because he had to
Speaker 1: stretch and fill because the other comedian didn't show up,
Speaker 1: and Jim wound up doing an extra forty minutes or
Speaker 1: an hour or whatever was the story there. Jim was
Speaker 1: quite upset about it. As we were doing the broadcast
Speaker 1: from the car show, we got word there was a
Speaker 1: reason Mitch Hedberg didn't show up for that show. He
Speaker 1: had passed away the night before. Mitch Hedberg passed away
Speaker 1: March thirty, two thousand and five in Livingston, New Jersey,
Speaker 1: not far from where I live, So we were like, oh,
Speaker 1: that kind of changed the mood several ways. One, we
Speaker 1: felt like we were being a bunch of jerks for
Speaker 1: being mad at the guy not showing. Two, we all
Speaker 1: love Mitch Hedburg, and holy cow, he had passed away.
Speaker 1: From personal experience. I knew at the radio station that
Speaker 1: I wanted to do a tribute to Mitch Hedburg, but
Speaker 1: I don't like being a vulture, so I didn't want to,
Speaker 1: like the next day be like, oh, wait, I do
Speaker 1: a Mitch Hedberg tribute, because then we make it about us.
Speaker 1: So we waited, and I eventually reached out to Mitch's wife,
Speaker 1: Lynn Shawcroft, and I'm like, hey, would love to do
Speaker 1: a tribute to Mitch. Would you be into that? She
Speaker 1: was into it. She came by. I got to know
Speaker 1: Lynn reasonably well, and when she came up, she had
Speaker 1: Mitch's notebooks with some jokes and a bunch of I
Speaker 1: think they were cassettes. They might have been CDs, but
Speaker 1: they were live shows recorded late in Mitch's career. And
Speaker 1: I was sitting there with Lynn and she hadn't heard
Speaker 1: them in a while, and they sounded great, and I
Speaker 1: said to her, you know, you've got another album here.
Speaker 1: That album became the posthumous Mitch Hedberg album that do
Speaker 1: you Believe? In Gosh? I had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: making the album, other than possibly perhaps putting the thought
Speaker 1: in Lynn's brain. I'm glad that that album was released.
Speaker 1: From a twenty thirteen article in GQ, GQ wrote, Mitch
Speaker 1: Hedberg was Twitter before Twitter. His jokes were short, inane,
Speaker 1: and timeless. It was on the road doing stand up
Speaker 1: three hundred nights a year, living off vending machines, writing
Speaker 1: constantly about the world he saw around him. Mike Birbigley
Speaker 1: said Mitch wrote some of the best jokes at the
Speaker 1: last three decades. He's one comedian who all comedians agree
Speaker 1: is great. Mitch was never without a pen and never
Speaker 1: threw away a notebook. Lynn Shawcroft kept most of the
Speaker 1: notebook's private, but back in twenty thirteen, she opened them
Speaker 1: up to g QGQ wrote the results a masterclass in comedy.
Speaker 1: There was only one time Mitch ever lost a notebook.
Speaker 1: He and Lynn were in Chicago that had gotten back
Speaker 1: to their hotel. When Mitch noticed it was missing, he
Speaker 1: tore through the hotel room looking for it. Lynn said
Speaker 1: it was one of the only times I saw him
Speaker 1: really visibly upset about something. Finally, after a while, he
Speaker 1: started telling himself, it's fine, everything'll be fine. That's when
Speaker 1: the phone rang. It was a kid at a frat party.
Speaker 1: Apparently Mitch had left the notebook on stage. Somehow it
Speaker 1: ended up in the hands of a college age fan
Speaker 1: who wanted to give it back. Mitch and Lynn headed
Speaker 1: to the party to meet the kid. When they got there,
Speaker 1: or relieve, Mitch pulled out a lot of cash tried
Speaker 1: hand to the kid. The kid didn't want any money,
Speaker 1: He just wanted Mitch to call him to hang out
Speaker 1: next time he was in town. But by then it
Speaker 1: was already five or six in the morning, and Mitch
Speaker 1: hated to feel indebted to people. He finally looked at
Speaker 1: the kid and said, just take the f and money man.
Speaker 1: Lynn says, Mitch's jokes were about our life. He wrote
Speaker 1: about what he liked, so his jokes were about sandwiches
Speaker 1: and carrots and staying in hotels and the weird ways language works.
Speaker 1: Now this next thing. I remember Lynn telling this to
Speaker 1: me when we were listening to the tapes I referred
Speaker 1: to earlier. We were in one of the smaller studios
Speaker 1: at Sirius, and she pointed out during Mitch's stand up,
Speaker 1: people would call out the endings before he could finish them.
Speaker 1: He was having a tough time touring because of that,
Speaker 1: so Lynn says later in his career he had to
Speaker 1: write jokes that were even shorter and faster. Examples, when
Speaker 1: someone tries to hand me out of flyer, it's just
Speaker 1: like saying here, you throw this away, or a turtlenecks,
Speaker 1: like being strangled by a really weak guy. All day,
Speaker 1: Mitch knew what else connected with his audience. Drug jokes.
Speaker 1: There were dozens. I like the FedEx driver because he's
Speaker 1: a drug dealer. He doesn't even know it. He's always
Speaker 1: on time. People associate long hair with drug use. I
Speaker 1: wish long hair was associated with something other than drug use,
Speaker 1: like an extreme longing for cake. That strangers would see
Speaker 1: a long haired guy and say that guy eats cake.
Speaker 1: He's on putt cake. To say another daughters, don't bring
Speaker 1: the cake eater over here anymore. He smells like flower.
Speaker 1: See how excited he got when he found out your
Speaker 1: birthday was fast approaching. At one point, Mitch started writing
Speaker 1: companies he liked looking for sponsorships. In addition to gold Bond,
Speaker 1: he wrote a uniball to say the jokes he wrote
Speaker 1: with their pens were funnier. Eventually, Jimmy Johns the Sandwich
Speaker 1: Makers signed on to sponsor Mitch Hedburg from the Guardian
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen. Mitch Hedburg a sly alchemist who turned
Speaker 1: sentences into comedy. Gold from behind sunglasses and bound head,
Speaker 1: Mitch Hedberg delivered concise gags that open up the mundane
Speaker 1: world and showed anyone could be a comedian. If you're
Speaker 1: flappable and have legs, you're never blocking a fire exit.
Speaker 1: That's the line that got the writer hooked on. Mitch Hedburg.
Speaker 1: A man standing still on a stage with his eyes shut,
Speaker 1: Mike in the stand reciting a list of staccato jokes
Speaker 1: with a percussive rhythm seemed odd. I'd never heard one
Speaker 1: liners before which had no hint of pun slinging or wordplay,
Speaker 1: just funny sentences. I guess the writer hadn't heard Stephen Wright.
Speaker 1: Believe me, I'm a huge Mitch Hedberg fan, but there's
Speaker 1: surely some Steven Wright influence in there. Mitch was a
Speaker 1: drug user or something, which caused his death in two
Speaker 1: thousand and five, but listening to him didn't sound like
Speaker 1: the ramlies of a typical stoner, but instead the thoughts
Speaker 1: of someone unencumbered by the conventional logic that gradually takes
Speaker 1: us over so we succumb to adulthood. Watching Mitch allow
Speaker 1: you to feel like a child again. And although kats
Speaker 1: and Hamburgers aren't important, finding humor in the mundane is
Speaker 1: Jokes such as if you live with a muster, you'd
Speaker 1: never get the hiccups require a sense of thought, But
Speaker 1: having been in his presence for two minutes allowed you
Speaker 1: to think with the Hedbergian that logic or is it Hedbergian?
Speaker 1: How would you pronounce that word I'm going with Hedbergian
Speaker 1: sounds cooler Hedbergie in that logic that guide you seamlessly
Speaker 1: to the funny. The joke is just ten words long,
Speaker 1: but ten words was enough for Hedberg to paint a
Speaker 1: hilarious and detailed picture that most people couldn't paint with
Speaker 1: one hundred. However, the audience aren't just laughing at the painting,
Speaker 1: but the man with the brush, and their own incredulity
Speaker 1: that a single person is able to have all these
Speaker 1: thoughts which don't make you just say, I've never thought
Speaker 1: of that in a way before, but instead, I've never
Speaker 1: thought about anything like that ever. His long hair often
Speaker 1: of skirt, his bowed sunglass face, he never showed dominance
Speaker 1: over the stage by pacing His hands would often be
Speaker 1: held still behind his back. He seemed shy, but this
Speaker 1: made him far more relatable than any confident comedian who
Speaker 1: chats to audiences with the unfettered glances of an old mate.
Speaker 1: Most audience members know they don't possess the requisite skills
Speaker 1: to talk on a stage as confidently, such as greats
Speaker 1: like Steve Martin or Sarah Silverman. So Mitch Hedberg's demeanor
Speaker 1: made him far more human to many people. He made
Speaker 1: me realize you don't need great performance skills and ability
Speaker 1: to write seamless segues to be a comedian. If the
Speaker 1: sentence you're saying are funny, people will laugh. As untimely
Speaker 1: passing means we'll never know what one of the most
Speaker 1: inventive and prolific writers in comedy could have eventually achieved.
Speaker 1: But watching a handful of his YouTube clips makes it
Speaker 1: clear he created more laughs and jokes in his one
Speaker 1: short life than many other comedians could hope to create
Speaker 1: in two. In twenty eleven, dead Spin wrote, by all accounts,
Speaker 1: Mitch Hepburgh was a pretty regular guy. He grew up
Speaker 1: in Saint Pame, Minnesota, before he ditched the suburbs, literally
Speaker 1: leaving his parents home without telling them after high school
Speaker 1: graduation because he didn't know how to tell them he
Speaker 1: was going. I met Mitch's parents at the Las Vegas
Speaker 1: Comedy Festival. Oh, it's got to be fifteen years ago now.
Speaker 1: They were so nice. Mitch eventually surfaced in Fort Lauderdale,
Speaker 1: eventually taking up kitchen work and trying his hand unsuccessfully
Speaker 1: at opened My Comedy Nights in the area. He begged
Speaker 1: his way onto MTV's short lived comic Kazi. I didn't
Speaker 1: know that, And even though the show didn't last, Hepburg
Speaker 1: was on his way. In ninety six, he appeared on
Speaker 1: Letterman Wow That Long Ago Wow. Ninety seven, he won
Speaker 1: the grand prize at the Seattle Comedy Competition. In ninety eight,
Speaker 1: he stole the show at the Just for Last Festival
Speaker 1: in Montreal. Heedburg developed a style of awkward, scattershot observational
Speaker 1: jokes that weren't exactly one liners. He was a minimalist, sure,
Speaker 1: but he was working on another level, and say Henny Youngman,
Speaker 1: his jokes weren't just riffs on existing tropes. The only
Speaker 1: norm hebburger here, too, was that there weren't any norms.
Speaker 1: His humor never met you halfway. He pulled listeners into
Speaker 1: his own head. His delivery was as off putting as
Speaker 1: his material. His was the sort of art that elicits
Speaker 1: a huh wow as opposed to a wow huh. That
Speaker 1: was his brilliance. The obvious point of comparison is with
Speaker 1: Stephen Wright, and again, on paper, the two comics seem
Speaker 1: to share a lot in common, but where Wright was
Speaker 1: a comic Gollum, an android programmed to tell off putting jokes.
Speaker 1: Hebburg was in an odd way, emotionally accessible as offbeat.
Speaker 1: As much as his jokes were, they presented in the
Speaker 1: manner of an odd ball childhood friend you hadn't seen
Speaker 1: in years. Though dressed in the garb of turn of
Speaker 1: the century hipster, Hedberg's jokes were decisively unironic. He wasn't
Speaker 1: engaging in social commentary or rye negativity as much as
Speaker 1: he was bearing his weirdo soul. The stoner labels inaccurate,
Speaker 1: but even the occasional drug user could identify Hepburg was
Speaker 1: you high, thinking you're funny, but actually being funny. That's
Speaker 1: how he won us over. The way he stood on stage,
Speaker 1: eyes closed, sunglasses on, bangs over his face, halfway trembling.
Speaker 1: He told joel Stein in nineteen ninety eight, I don't
Speaker 1: like to connect with the crowd. I find if you
Speaker 1: look at people's faces, you see a disappointed face. He said.
Speaker 1: Sometimes in the middle of the night, I think of
Speaker 1: something that's funny, I go get a pen write it down,
Speaker 1: or if the pen's too far away, I had to
Speaker 1: vinced myself that what I thought of ain't funny. He
Speaker 1: broke the fourth wall repeatedly in an attempt to reposition
Speaker 1: himself from alone on stage to seated among the audience.
Speaker 1: That's like a carbon copy of the previous joke, but
Speaker 1: with different ingredients. I don't know what I was trying
Speaker 1: to pull off there, that joke, maybe laugh where I
Speaker 1: could finish it, which is good because it's no ending,
Speaker 1: all right. Oh, he was so good once when being
Speaker 1: handed a drink mid joke, a joke that was foundering anyway,
Speaker 1: he just cut the joke off and said that up
Speaker 1: a joke, a joke about FFing up, an fed up joke.
Speaker 1: After he broke out it just for laughs. Edburgh got
Speaker 1: a five hundred thousand dollars development deal with Fox. He
Speaker 1: appeared on Letterman a few more times. He financed his
Speaker 1: own movie, a subtle tribute to his restaurant days, called
Speaker 1: Los Enchiladas. His next paragraph has a couple jokes that
Speaker 1: I don't remember hearing dead smend rights with disarming subtlety.
Speaker 1: He deconstructed the stand up form by ticking on hackneyed
Speaker 1: subjects and turning them on their head, or by bombing
Speaker 1: deliberately halfway sports. No. I don't want the f Remember
Speaker 1: that show My Three Sons. It'd be funny if it
Speaker 1: was called My One Dad. Wait what, I just bought
Speaker 1: a two bedroom house, But I think I get to
Speaker 1: decide how many bedrooms there are. I hohtsh you. In
Speaker 1: the context of tripping non sequitors about koala infestations potato chips,
Speaker 1: this came off as subversive. He was blowing himself up
Speaker 1: along with everyone in the room. The self destruction extended
Speaker 1: to his personal life. At first, it seemed div Hedberg's
Speaker 1: riffing on his drug use was more of a dig
Speaker 1: atous stage persona. My manager saw me backstage and said, Mitch,
Speaker 1: don't use liquor as a crutch. I can't use liquor
Speaker 1: as a crutch because a crutch helps me walk. A
Speaker 1: liquor severely f's up the way I walk. Some people
Speaker 1: think I'm high on stage. I would never get high
Speaker 1: before show because when I'm high, I don't want to
Speaker 1: stand in front of a bunch of people I don't
Speaker 1: know for stretches. He lived off the grid, living out
Speaker 1: of hotels or out of the RV he bought with
Speaker 1: Lynn Shawcroft in May two thousand and three, after showing
Speaker 1: Austin Mitch was arrested for possession of a controlled substance.
Speaker 1: He spent two and a half days in jail, followed
Speaker 1: by six months in a hospital, supposedly for the treatment
Speaker 1: of a leg badly mangled by heroin injections. Through the
Speaker 1: end of his life, he'd walked on stage with two
Speaker 1: plastic cups that were widely known to contain alcohol, and
Speaker 1: at least one specifically identified as screwdrivers. Hebburg had kill
Speaker 1: her sets and less successful sets. Some lack verves, some
Speaker 1: lack directions. Sometimes he couldn't remember the jokes at all.
Speaker 1: Sometimes his fans would holler out the jokes who was
Speaker 1: trying to tell to help him out. It was interactive
Speaker 1: stand up. Even on the good nights, people sung along
Speaker 1: to the choruses that often step on his punchlines. Hebburg
Speaker 1: had so fully seduced his fans the division between stage
Speaker 1: and seats fell away. Didn't you ever hear of dramatic pause? Hid,
Speaker 1: sometimes grouch, But that was the point. His fans weren't
Speaker 1: attuned to the artifice of performance so much as they
Speaker 1: were there for communion. Lynn Shawcroft is Missus Mitch Hedburg,
Speaker 1: and she had some really interesting tweets. Lynn tweeted, what
Speaker 1: Mitch Hedburg achieved in stand up comedy is nothing short
Speaker 1: of astonishing. The way he did it, almost one fan
Speaker 1: at a time, is crazy yet admirable. He had several
Speaker 1: appearances on late night television and one low rent Comedy
Speaker 1: Central special. That's it. The Comedy Central was fun by
Speaker 1: low Rent. I'm referring to the audience that was papered.
Speaker 1: They weren't fans per se, never heard of the comedians.
Speaker 1: I think Mark Maron taped a special the same day
Speaker 1: slash same audience. I could be wrong. Norm MacDonald was
Speaker 1: there a tell two. Mitch didn't have an online presence
Speaker 1: or platform. He wasn't on a TV show with a
Speaker 1: built in audience. I remember club after club packed. He
Speaker 1: worked too much. He had a hard time saying no.
Speaker 1: So after Lynn wrote all that, I love this tweet
Speaker 1: reply from Toby Welch. So Lynn writes all that about Mitch,
Speaker 1: and Toby Welch tweets, Yeah, that's nice, but what happened
Speaker 1: to the defriines. This next section is from two episodes.
Speaker 1: The first story is about the missing ten of minutes
Speaker 1: and then you oh, I'll hear my voice change. I
Speaker 1: was on my Twitter account and a friend of mine,
Speaker 1: Brian Rich, he tweeted like a normal this is just
Speaker 1: a normal guy tweeting, and he tweeted Tuesday night, I
Speaker 1: bought it pie and thus I'm ready to watch the debate.
Speaker 1: And when I read it, my brain did it in
Speaker 1: Hebburg going, I bought a pie and that's I'm ready
Speaker 1: to watch the debate. That's ridiculous, which right, like, despite
Speaker 1: my half ass impression, that's like a Mitch Hedberg joke.
Speaker 1: So this article I found, it's really really great. Bradlaidman
Speaker 1: dot com. Brad wrote the night I first saw Mitch,
Speaker 1: my only whole show was not a great night for him.
Speaker 1: Most of the people there had no idea who they
Speaker 1: were going to see. I did. That's exactly why I
Speaker 1: was there. They looked at him, like Bill Hicks said,
Speaker 1: through the eyes of a dog that's just been shown
Speaker 1: a card trick. They didn't try to get him, and
Speaker 1: they decided it was just funnier to keep buying him drinks. Sadly,
Speaker 1: whether Mitch considered himself an alcoholic, he probably did. Doug
Speaker 1: Stanhope once told me, that's Brad, that Mitch was so
Speaker 1: nice that Mitch would never turn anyone away and would
Speaker 1: never refuse a drink from anyone out of courtesy, fan
Speaker 1: or not. Lynn Shawcroft, to her credit, did eventually go
Speaker 1: up on stage and stop Mitch from accepting free drinks.
Speaker 1: After about fifteen minutes more of only a few people
Speaker 1: laughing at really good material delivered well, Lynn started I
Speaker 1: him to tell people about his great CD that was
Speaker 1: available for purchase. Mitch ignored her for a long time
Speaker 1: and then said something approximating this. I got to waste
Speaker 1: my time for what like three people? Why would anyone
Speaker 1: actually buy this crap? About three of us raised our
Speaker 1: hand and I did purchase it that night. So when
Speaker 1: it was released by Comedy Central in two thousand and three,
Speaker 1: it had twenty one tracks and was fifty three minutes
Speaker 1: and forty seven seconds long. My version, which is what
Speaker 1: I burned on on my computer, is one hour, three
Speaker 1: minutes and four seconds. That's exactly how I want it
Speaker 1: to be. I may have to reach out to this
Speaker 1: guy and do an interview with him. I want to
Speaker 1: know all about this alternate version of the CD that
Speaker 1: he has. He writes it has no tracks, just one huge,
Speaker 1: probably unedited chunk of the real show, which is why
Speaker 1: I had to go to the internet first to find
Speaker 1: my quote quickly. I should have just listened to the
Speaker 1: whole thing again, even though I was only making a
Speaker 1: quick Facebook comment about Little League Baseball that I could
Speaker 1: have spent two seconds on had I wanted to be
Speaker 1: lazy and posted the meme from the Internet. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure why or who edited out those ten minutes from
Speaker 1: my original, but it was probably for idiotic reasons that
Speaker 1: didn't get who Mitch was or the brilliance of Mitch
Speaker 1: of guessing. For all I know, Mitch could have said,
Speaker 1: take exactly these ten minutes out, but I would bet
Speaker 1: my net worth that never happened. My suspicion is that
Speaker 1: the business people thought those ten minutes didn't go over
Speaker 1: well and were complete jokes. But if he saw him
Speaker 1: that night or any night, you would know that he
Speaker 1: would always throw out a joke and then would immediately
Speaker 1: say wasn't a complete thought or even a joke, and
Speaker 1: his delivery of it and the reaction to it would
Speaker 1: likely be the highlight of the entire show. Near the
Speaker 1: end of the uncut version of especially says I'm a
Speaker 1: heroin addict I need to have sex with women who
Speaker 1: saved someone's life, which would have been perfect had it
Speaker 1: ended there, but it didn't, and because it didn't, it
Speaker 1: became somehow more perfect. After some giggling and a small
Speaker 1: amount of applause, he starts again wondering about how it
Speaker 1: be shown on television. When does it air? He looks
Speaker 1: at some of the crowd says, you're a good reaction guy.
Speaker 1: Keep the camera on that guy. I want to tell
Speaker 1: the people in the truck wherever you're cutting reaction shot
Speaker 1: cut to him, because you're really could you very? You
Speaker 1: laugh a lot man, very pleasurable to see. My special
Speaker 1: is going to be all cut up. It's gonna be
Speaker 1: very weird. It's not going to be seamless. I gotta
Speaker 1: get out of here. They're going to get mad at me,
Speaker 1: and know it gonna get yelled at all right. I
Speaker 1: love you guys, thanks for coming to my special. The
Speaker 1: aired version ends with a different great joke and then
Speaker 1: cuts right to I love you guys and to thank you.
Speaker 1: The al right is gone, which may not seem to
Speaker 1: matter much, but do some research about Jim Morrison hearing
Speaker 1: Elvis throw the word all right, and how much it
Speaker 1: mattered to him, and how much he did it too.
Speaker 1: Isn't that amazing? The article also mentions when Mitch was
Speaker 1: on Howard Stern late in Mitch's life, Stern asked Mitch
Speaker 1: what Mitch would do if he knew that perhaps he
Speaker 1: only had a few months to live. Creepy right. Mitch
Speaker 1: thought about it a while and answered, I won't do
Speaker 1: the impression here. Wow, that's a really hard question. I
Speaker 1: do know that Bill Hicks knew that he was dying
Speaker 1: and did work really hard until the day he died,
Speaker 1: like he went to Waco and stuff like that. Me
Speaker 1: I sort of don't think I'm that important because most
Speaker 1: of my jokes are about bananas and things like that.
Speaker 1: And let's wrap with an album review from two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight from the Washington Posts. This the review of
Speaker 1: the posthumus Do You Believe In Gosh, a stand up
Speaker 1: performance recorded two months before Hedberg's death. The album is
Speaker 1: funny moments, but listeners familiar with the comedian's personal history
Speaker 1: may find that Hebberg's troubled specter looms over the proceedings.
Speaker 1: Do You Believe In Gosh does include bits on anchovies
Speaker 1: and carrot juice, but Hebburg also delves into darker subject matter.
Speaker 1: He seems particularly fixated on missing body parts, with references
Speaker 1: to amputation, a woman born without arms, and extended bit
Speaker 1: on the Headless Horsemen. Granted the materials more silly than morbid.
Speaker 1: I'd hate to be the headless Horseman's dentist. He wouldn't
Speaker 1: make very much money. He also delves into his professional life,
Speaker 1: saying I got a door deal here. Tonight, I'm working
Speaker 1: for fIF percent of the door. Then tomorrow I'm working
Speaker 1: for fifth percent of the door, and then on Sunday,
Speaker 1: I'm going to have a door. Since the album comprises
Speaker 1: a seemingly unedited live show, the forty minute runtime includes
Speaker 1: at least as much laughter and applause as it does
Speaker 1: Mitch Hedburg. His reactions to the audience are sometimes as
Speaker 1: funny as jokes. At one point, he trails off, then
Speaker 1: assures the audience trust me. It's hilarious to get into
Speaker 1: my head and come back out and tell me I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: Towards the end of the performance, self consciousness seems to
Speaker 1: win out over the professed confidence, as Hedberg refers to
Speaker 1: his jokes as half there needing work. In some cases,
Speaker 1: he's correct, but we'll never hear the fully realized versions.
Speaker 1: The Washington Post wrote, the album strange poignancy may be
Speaker 1: best captured by one of Hegberg's typically observed setups. I
Speaker 1: want to ride and a cold air balloon. I'm afraid
Speaker 1: of heights. I don't want to leave here well and
Speaker 1: take a ride in my cold air balloon because we
Speaker 1: ain't eving going anywhere. And that is your comedy news
Speaker 1: for today, Mitch Hedburg boy, I miss him. He was fantastic,
Speaker 1: all right, See tomorrow.