The slaphappy slacker

Forget Seinfeld - Mitch Hedberg is a whole other kind of standup

For comparative purposes, there are apples and oranges. And then there are apples ... and burgers in an all-night greasy spoon when you've got "the munchies" after last call.
 
 That's pretty much the conceptual gulf between Jerry Seinfeld and Mitch Hedberg, the itinerant, almost-soporifically laidback slacker comic who made the biggest splash at Montreal's Just For Laughs festival this year, and who was absurdly dubbed afterward by no less than Time magazine as "the next Seinfeld."
 
 Except for the fact that Seinfeld starred in a sitcom, and Hedberg -- who's at Comedywood's new Bloor club starting Wednesday -- just signed a $500,000 development deal to create a Fox sitcom (and could be a pop phenomenon at this time next year), these two could be from different planets.
 
 Seinfeld is almost pathologically fastidious. The grunge-attired, bed-head-haired Hedberg says that when he was a kid, "I always wanted a job where I could wear my shirt out."
 
 Seinfeld is clean as a whistle. Hedberg -- whose digs while in town were rank with the smell of incense -- is frank about his use of light recreational drugs. Among thematic one-liners in his act: "I used'ta do drugs ... I mean, I still do, but I used'ta do 'em too."
 
 Of Visine(TM), he says "Of course that's a drug product. Nobody ever says, 'Can I use your Visine? I don't want anybody to know I was swimming.' "
 
 Seinfeld is notoriously fussy about his environment. Hedberg and a buddy lived in a car for three years.
 
 As the 30-year-old Hedberg tells it, his comedy career was born at an open mike while on the road in Boca Raton, Fla. -- sometime after he "met these two strippers in Los Angeles who put me and my friends up for, like, two months.
 
 "We left (his hometown St. Paul, Minn.) when I was 19, and my folks were kinda shocked since we just left without tellin'," Hedberg says in his oddly-lilted accent, part acquired-Southern/part hipster. "I know if I'd'a confronted them with it, they would'a tried to hold me back. It was the right thing to do totally. But at that point, y'know, I wasn't going to college, so that was a bone of contention.
 
 "But my dad now is very happy with how things turned out." How'd he like the Time article? "He just totally digged it."
 
 Not that he's any more rooted now that he has money. Hedberg was recently living with a girlfriend in New York, and was urged to move out. "It was in-fie-delity, I gotta be honest about that," he says. "I even used the President as a defence." Subsequently, he moved into a hotel and sent "all my possessions" home to Minnesota. The shipping bill was $30.
 
 But having low overhead means money he sees from being the "next big thing" can be spent creatively. An earlier deal, with now-defunct Three Arts Television, financed Los Enchiladas, a film he wrote about "a Mexican restaurant where there are no Mexicans, the food really ain't Mexican, and there's no real Mexican vibe goin' on. It's like Chi Chi's." The film, cast with New York comics like Dave Attell and Marc Maron, is being submitted to the Sundance Festival.
 
 "Out of that half-million (from Fox) I'll probably end up with 225 (thousand), some of which I'll spend on, like, post (production). Y'know, it costs $25,000 for a sound mix. Every time I spend money on the movie, I think I could buy a brand new car. But then you don't need a car in New York."
 
 Los Enchiladas impressed TV producer Mike Judge (Beavis & Butt-head, King Of The Hill), who saw sitcom potential. "I hung around his joint for a while, we smoked a joint and talked. As of yesterday, my agent tells me he's still interested."
 
 More immediately, he's about to tape a special for U.S. Comedy Central, for which the Comedywood gig "is training. Basically, I just wanted to come up and f--- around with my material."
 
 "I was a little concerned at one point, because they told me I had to have a physical before I could do this special.
 
 "Then I thought, like, 'Oh man, they might test me for drugs. Then I realized that's, like, not going to happen. 'Cause these are standup comics. If they did that, they wouldn't have anybody left to shoot."