Lynn Shawcroft, the widow of beloved stand-up comedian Mitch Hedberg, wrote a guest column for The Hollywood Reporter today titled “The Late Comic Isn’t Done Being Funny.†The piece serves as a look back on Hedberg’s comedy 13 years after his death from his wife’s perspective (“He’s often referred to as a ‘one-liner comedian’ — and I’ll fist fight anyone who says that!â€), but Shawcroft also teases readers with a bunch of never-before-released Hedberg material she’s held on to for the last decade:
Mitch was constantly jotting ideas onto paper. I have boxes and boxes of his notebooks, envelopes stuffed with hotel pads and scribbled-on napkins. I even found an airplane barf bag covered with notes. When he wasn’t writing, he was talking into a microcassette recorder, so I also have boxes of microtapes of him practicing and perfecting his material — material that’s never been heard. And then there’s the footage. Mitch and I shot four of his shows on 16mm. That’s enough for a brand-new concert film. And there’s other film Mitch shot himself, with his voiceover. Enough for a documentary. A documentary that he could narrate himself!
Shawcroft goes on to say she’s been working with an L.A.-based production company to digitize everything and that her goal is that “everything Mitch left behind, every half-written joke, every spontaneous utterance onto microtape, will be accessible with a few clicks on a mouse.†Shawcroft has released Hedberg material before, like when she gave GQ a bunch of his notebook pages in 2013, but it sounds like this new project will be much more comprehensive: “It’s taken me a long time to get to this place, but I think I’m finally ready to become a better widow,†Shawcroft writes. “And that means at some point soon, all of you will be hearing and seeing Mitch again. And I’m betting he’ll still make you look at the world in a slightly different way.â€