Mitch Hedberg

Mitch Hedberg would be the king of twitter if he was alive today. To honor him, I've decided to analyze some of his top jokes. This will be done using R's text mining package, tm, as well as SnowballC, wordcloud, and viridis. To start, I scraped this BuzzFeed article to compile a .csv of the jokes.

Mitch Hedberg's six shortest jokes consisted of 8, 9, 10, and 11 words, and are written below.

  1. Dogs are forever in the pushup position.
  2. A severed foot is the ultimate stocking stuffer.
  3. I remixed the remix… it was back to normal.
  4. A burrito is a sleeping bag for ground beef!
  5. I tried to walk into Target… but I missed.
  6. I drank some boiling water… because I wanted to whistle.

  7. In contrast, Mitch's six longest jokes surprisingly consisted of 141, 131, 109, 103, 96, and 92 words.

    1. You know when you go to a restaurant on the weekends, it’s busy, so they start a waiting list? They start calling out names, they say Dufrane, party of two. Table ready for Dufrane, party of two. And if no one answers, they’ll say their name again. Dufrane, party of two. But then if no one answers they’ll just go right on to the next name. Bush, party of three. Yeah, but what happened to the Dufranes? No one seems to care. Who can eat at a time like this? People are missing. You people are selfish. The Dufranes are in someone’s trunk right now, with duct tape over their mouths. And they’re hungry - that’s a double whammy. We need help. Bush, SEARCH party of three! You can eat once you find the Dufranes.
    2. In England, Smokey the Bear is not the forest fire prevention representative. They have Smacky the Frog. It’s a lot like a bear, but it’s a frog. I think that’s a better system. I think we should adopt it. Because bears can be mean, but frogs are always cool. Never has there been a frog hopping toward me, and I thought Man, I’d better play dead. Here comes that frog. I would never say Here comes that frog in a horrifying manner. It’s always, like, optimistic. Like, Hey, here comes that frog, all right. Maybe he will settle near me and I can pet him, and put him in a mayonnaise jar, with a stick and a leaf, to recreate what he’s used to.
    3. I was at a bar, I was minding my own business, no one was talking to me, because I had just did a show. This guy bumped into me which is cool, but he didn’t apologize, he said Move, and I thought that was rude so I said Go to hell, and then I started to run. He caught up with me. He had a mustache, a goatee, a pair of earrings, a pair of sunglasses, his hair was in a ponytail, and he was wearing a hat. He said Hey, you got a lot of nerve. I said Hey, you got a lot of… cranium accessories.
    4. … it’s against regulations for Subway to sell just the bun. I guess the two halves ain’t supposed to touch. So I said, All right, well put some lettuce on it, which they did. They said it’d be a $1.75. I said It’s for a duck. They said All right, then it’s free. See, I did not know that. Ducks eat for free at Subway. Had I known that, I would have ordered a much larger sandwich. Let me have the steak fajita sub. But don’t bother ringing it up, it’s for a duck!
    5. I used to live here in Los Angeles, on Sierra Bonita, and I had an apartment, and I had a neighbor. And whenever he would knock on my wall, I knew he wanted me to turn my music down. And that made me angry, cause I like loud music. So when he knocked on the wall, I’d mess with his head. I’d say, Go around! I cannot open the wall. I don’t know if you have a doorknob on the other side, but over here there’s nothing… it’s just flat!
    6. When you’re in Hollywood and you’re a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things besides comedy. They say All right you’re a stand up comedian, can you act? Can you write? Write us a script. They want me to do things that’s related to comedy, but it’s not comedy. That’s not fair. It’s as though if I was a cook, and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, and they said All right you’re a cook… can you farm?

    Finally, I made a wordcloud of all the words in these jokes.

    I think there's something to the fact that the word know was used more than any other word. It is as if Mitch offered some special insight into our world.

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