Writer’s block

Deer in the headlights

An ode to comedian Mitch Hedberg — A bittersweet account of one of his final performances
By Ross Kennerly

All I could think was: Mitch, get off the stage.

Mitch Hedberg had turned the last five minutes of his Wednesday act at Zanies into what had stretched into a half-hour of nervous tension, self-abnegation and sporadic pity-laughter from the crowd members. He had lost his audience — which in stand-up is tantamount to temporary professional suicide — and was desperately looking for a last laugh; a final, resolved note to end on.

“Wait, wait — I got it …” Mitch said, after flipping through a black binder composed of what I guessed was a fake book of old jokes. He righted himself, ran a hand through his hair and straightened his tinted glasses.

“A burrito is a sleeping bag fo’ beef,” he announced in his patent stoner patois.

“People say, ‘Hey’s that a breakfast burrito?’ ”

“ ‘No, it’s just early.’ ”

Giggles rippled through the audience, but not laughter.

* Mitch Hedberg, a Minnesota-born comedian who worked in nightclubs, television and film in a wide-ranging career, died in New Jersey, his family said. He was 37. Hedberg, who struggled with drugs and alcohol, died Wednesday in a hotel room in Livingston, N.J. Pending the medical examiner’s report, the cause of death appears to be heart failure, said his mother, Mary Hedberg. She said her son was born with a heart defect and frequently felt anxious about his condition.

“No, no, f--- you,” Mitch spurted, more to himself than the crowd. “That’s not funny.”

He turned back to the piano bench, where his absinthe-colored drink in a tall glass and fake book were set. He held up the drink and shook it in the yellow stagelight.

“Hey, can I get another one of these?” he directed to the bar behind the audience.

“You can’t get a drink here, Mitch!” someone, a punk kid with dye-black mop of hair and a burning cigarette, shouted.

The kid’s friend punched him in the shoulder.

The white noise of clothes rustling and lighters flicking stopped. Pause. Mitch, stunned, stared.

“Sh--, man,” he said, finally. “I don’t even understand that sh--. I’m gonna be on tour in New Jersey, and I’ll still be thinking about that … .”

“… You’re a f---ing … obtuse heckler.”

* Mary Hedberg said speculation that her son’s death was drug-related was gossip. “We don’t know that for a fact,” she said, but added, “It’s not a secret Mitch used drugs. Whether that played a role in his death or not, we don’t know.”

A hit on “The Late Show With David Letterman,” on which he appeared 10 times, and “The Howard Stern Show,” Hedberg once was dubbed “the next Seinfeld” by Time magazine. But TV-series fame eluded him because his unique style of mumbled one-liners didn’t lend itself to the sitcom format.

“Jimmy John’s!” another audience member had belted earlier in Mitch’s act.

“Jimmy John’s?” Mitch replied, chuckling. “No no, no Jimmy John’s.”

“For those of you who don’t know,” he continued, “I did some voice-over work for Jimmy John’s sandwiches. It was fun, man. Did I sell out?” he had asked, rhetorically. “Yes. But it was cool, man: Tellin’ jokes was fun … then I go, ‘Jimmy John’s comes with lettuce and tomato and special seasoning,’ and then I’m like, ‘That sh-- does not sound right.’”

That bit got good laughs.

* Hedberg delivered absurdist, random observations in a spacy [sic] staccato. His long, dirty blond hair harkened to the image of a 1970s stoner. Jokes about Hedberg’s drug use were a staple of his act. He took a hiatus from performing for several months after a May 2003 arrest in Austin, Texas, for felony possession of heroin.

Throughout his hour-long act (“I got 50 minutes to do,” Mitch had assured the crowd at the outset. “What’s that?” he said, checking his watch. “Forty-eight. Sh--.”), a significant portion had been inadvertently redirected into non-sequitur slapstick — stoner slapstick, more stumbling into things than pratfalling — such as climbing onto the piano bench and knocking on the drop ceiling, hiding behind the backdrop curtain, or poking at Zanies’ black-and-white plastic marquee suspended behind the stage.

“That’s a good way to tell people that you’ve made it,” he said, referring to the latter. “ ‘Hey, Mitch, your name in lights?’ ‘Nope. White polka dots.’ ”

That joke killed.

* His rambling, non-sequitur style often drew comparisons to Steven Wright, but Hedberg disagreed.

“You’re f---ing funny!” a woman drawled from the back of the bar, next to where I was seated under a signed photo of Nora Dunn, obviously a retort to the young heckler.

“Thank you!” Mitch exuberantly responded. “I think you’re sexy! And foul.”

* “If I made potato chips and put them in a can, people would say I was ripping off Pringles,” he said. “But what if I put them in a bag?”

Finally, a server brought over another green drink in a tall glass on a tray. The opening act, a Puerto Rican comic, took it and handed it to Mitch, who came over quickly, thankful for the respite.

“Okay, okay, okay,” Mitch said between sips, “I gotta end on a laugh. See, Chicago’s a different town, man. I was here last night, and I was getting good laughs, and now tonight … I don’t know, man, maybe it’s the cold weather.”

He took another sip of his drink, twirling the microphone at waist level with his wrist while he thought.

“Just get off the stage,” I heard someone behind me whisper. Mitch was already half-off the stage, technically. Since the house opener had handed him the drink, he hadn’t moved, leaning on the handrail to the stage steps, next to the front door. Normally, at Zanies, a flashlight beam is the signal to get off the stage, but it hadn’t happened yet, either out of mercy or pity, I couldn’t tell.

Suddenly, Mitch had an idea, because his face lit up. He had found a way off.

“Wait a minute, man, wait a minute. How long is this microphone?”

He tugged at the cord, and finding a lot of slack, walked down the stage steps, through a curtain and out the front door.

Applause.

“All right, folks, have a good night!” he belted from the speakers, with the sounds of Wells Avenue traffic.

And that was the end of Mitch.

* Excerpts courtesy of the Associated Press and other souces, March 30, 2005.

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photo courtesy of mitchhedberg.net