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"\n\n It's been six years since Mitch died. We miss him more every year. He was so funny that he made you question your sanity\u2014Is it even possible for a joke about Pringles to be this funny?\u2014but as time passes we're coming to realize how his sense of humor depended upon his optimism and sweetness, and that's what we miss the most. When he performed, he actually wore rose-colored glasses sometimes, behind which his eyes were often closed against stage fright so overpowering that it made him shake like someone with a motor-neuron disease. He was never cynical or abrasive, and tried to avoid jokes about sex, though not always.\n\n A friend of mine saw Mitch at the 40 Watt Club, in Athens, Ga., just as he was starting to find success. Mitch wasn't used to selling out clubs. So when the manager handed him a thick packet of cash after the show, Mitch, accustomed to getting paid with drink and drugs, was nonplussed. What to do with all this loot? \"Hey, you guys, hang out for a minute,\" he said, or something like that, and left the club. Some minutes later, he returned with presents for all: tiny bags of cocaine. Hedberg was generous, even with the same drug that would kill him in 2005.\n\n Mitch told an unusual number of jokes about arrows, vice, food (1, 2), especially pancakes, and enhanced states of consciousness, but he was a master of his language, which was a psychedelic mixture of formality (he eschewed contractions) and sloppiness that was actually a higher form of precision. Take his most famous joke: I used to do drugs. I still do them, but I used to, too. Notice how that final, awkward too queasily snags and slows the punchline, dramatizing the intense privacy of being on drugs.\n\n He wasn't a drug-comic, though; he told old-fashioned one-liners, too. A severed foot is the ultimate stocking stuffer. I haven't slept for 10 days, because that would be too long. I saw a human pyramid once; it was very unnecessary. My girlfriend works at Hooter's\u2026in the kitchen. This shirt is dry-clean only, which means it's dirty. (This wasn't his only joke about dry cleaners.)\n\n His m\u00E9tier was a quiet deconstruction of observational humor. He removed the comic from the joke. He didn't mug the moment of comic insight\u2014Did you see this, did you hear about this? Did you ever notice that? His jokes lacked that compromise; he forced his listeners to flash through their memories and imaginations and make the observation themselves. To laugh at his jokes was to be delighted at the process of collaboration and discovery. I like to hold the microphone like this. I pinch it together, then I let it go and you hear a whole bunch of jokes at once. You see the joke-spraying water hose. You see yourself, suddenly absurd, practicing tennis alone in a public park.\n\n My favorite Mitch Hedberg joke these days isn't really a joke, and isn't even funny, but it's emplary in its way: I've always wanted to have a suitcase handcuffed to my wrist. That's not a full joke there. At best, it's good for a chuckle, even if you've also watched \"Miami Vice,\" or whatever, and had the same thought. But it succeeds regardless, because it reminds us of what is most excellent about living in the world that Mitch left early, with all its ludicrous charms."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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