Do You Believe In Gosh?

Album Review

Gone far too soon, Do You Believe in Gosh? is the first posthumous Mitch Hedberg release, one recorded live in Ontario, Canada in early 2005 when the surreal comic was working on an album that would never be. Anyone familiar with the Live in Chicago bootleg will recognize quite a bit of the material here and might also notice how it's being refined and worked into a routine worthy of official release. Unfortunately, it's not quite there yet and not up to the standards of Hedberg's two official albums — Mitch All Together and Strategic Grill Locations — which somehow did the impossible and linked a slew of Steven Wright-styled one liners into a cohesive end-to-end listen. This is Mitch warts and all, desperately trying to regain a rhythm when jokes start to fail and only sometimes getting in that Hedberg groove where "wow man" meets relaxed focus. The good news is that the drugs that ended his life don't seem to be affecting this set at all and the lines that do work are numerous and work splendidly. After wondering how clean the inside of cleaning fluid bottle must be, he offers "If I had a dollar for every time I said that I'd be making money in a very weird way." "Now is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus or a really cool opotamus?" is typical Mitch and the riffing on how tough kids in Venice must have "canal smarts" is hilarious. The liner notes feature scribbles from Mitch's notebooks plus a short, sweet, and heartwarming note from his widow Lynn Shawcroft. Not the Hedberg CD to start with, but for his rabid cult following this is a necessary purchase.