Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Mitch Hedberg and Wordplay

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6xaj2fC1jI

If you're familiar with the late comedian Mitch Hedberg, you know his joke style is founded on a kind of surrealist humor that involves wordplay, non-sequiturs and anticlimax. I was reminded of Hedberg when we were reading the Lorrie Moore story about the librarian and her fondness for making up Tom Swifties. Not knowing what those were, I Wikipedia'ed them and clicked through all the related hyperlinks on the page, one of them being "paraprosdokians" or anticlimactic statements, such as:

"I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long."-Hedberg

Anyway, wordplay is fun and Hedberg was a genius.

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