Talk:Mitch Hedberg

Website problem
Tried the link to the website today and it looks like it has been discontinued. BTW - these jokes are really funny! Barry Haupt, 12/28/2005.

Not a memoriam
I've removed all the rememberances and in-memoriams and "I loved Mitch" notes. This page is for talking about the style and content of the Wikiquote page, not about the comedians. Wikiquote is not a forum for discussion. Please do not post such things here, they might be deleted quickly. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 09:01, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

Style
Mitch Hedberg in performance was quiet, even painfully shy. I do not remember him ever raising his voice. So please do not put words in bold. I remember him stressing certain words, such as "did" in "but I did hit a guy," so italics are probably okay. --Eustace Tilley 15:54, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the comment, but as other articles on wikiquote (Albert Einstein, Aristotle, John F. Kennedy, George Burns, etc) use this style; bold does not mean shouting, but rather an emphasize on memorable lines. As for your revert on alphabetical organization is totally unnecessary; if there was a time stamp (historic) we would organize it by that format, but since it is not, we go with an alpha order (users who still use keywords may do so) but it is simpler to add (and thus elimante duplicates) if it's in order. PEACE ~ RoboAction 21:13, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
 * In sharp contrast to the authors you mention, Mitch Hedberg's work is not sententious. The reader supplies the appropriate emphasis while reading; one size does not suit all. --Eustace Tilley 22:33, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Groupings
I gathered the jokes about food and beverages into a group. There are some other themes, such as wordplay ("2-in-1"), altered states (drugs and alcohol), unconventional insights ("banana vs traffic light"), but geez, so much of his act was the non-sequitur nature I feel bad organizing it. --Eustace Tilley 00:51, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Alphabetizing his quotes makes almost as little sense to me as would alphabetizing the Iliad. His is an oral legacy; many of his sayings begin with the same conversational leadin. Readers searching for a quote can find it with their browser's search facility by means of a remembered word ("banana", "duck", "harsh"). I see no benefit for the user, and I don't like making Mitch Hedberg's work appear mechanical or formulaic. --Eustace Tilley 15:54, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I would just like to say...
Thanks for editing the death metal joke, I knew I had forgotten part of it and it came to me today, I was just about to edit it. I feel very foolish for not remembering it in its entirety.

Warning profanity?
I tried doing some searches to find other pages that had been branded Warning: This page contains profanity and drug references ? Seems unessesary and is a certain type of censorship. Not even mentioning the ignorance of the Drug Reference warning. That in it's self is highly offensive to me. (added by User:Sveden)


 * Agreed. I've removed the warning. ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 15:09, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

I would like to ask someone to edit out the profanities in many of the jokes down there, as most curses shown were not really used in many of his routines. He was more layed back and shy than the outlandish cursing type that we see today.


 * Listen to "Strategic Grill Locations." He cursed on there a decent number of times. GURoadrunner.

Listen to Mitch All Together, he curses on there much more. Perhaps the user is familiar only with his televised appearances. They're not as profane.

This is not wikisource
Although it is very impressive that one would attempt to script out an entire 45 minute comedy set, this is not what wikiquote is. You may move it to wikisource although it may be a copyright violation. Please check out this page WQ:NOT Sveden 16:27, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

This article is not a copyvio for many reasons, and does not belong in Wikisource. One of the biggest reasons it is not a recreation of a 45-minute comedy set, as you claim, is because a comedy set is grouped together in an intentional comedic order. These quotes are not organized in that way. They are stripped out and re-categorized. Anyone with any comedic skill will tell you that the heart of a routine is the order of the jokes, the meta-story -- this page makes no attempt at that, and so you are wrong. Please find some other article to try out your annoying, fun-spoiling theories on. 69.142.21.24 18:53, 7 May 2006 (UTC)


 * The order of content in a quote article has nothing to do with its potential copyright violation. Quantity most certainly does. Sveden has a very good point. Editors of this article are urged to consider how this article might be construed as undermining the market for a quote book by whomever has the rights to Hedberg's material, and trim this article significantly, lest someone ignorant of his work do an inelegant job of reduction, as I had to do for Jack Handey. This is a very real concern. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 04:25, 1 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Not a copyvio. It's not a direct translation of a comedy set, it's a bunching of quotes. GURoadrunner


 * Most copyright violations are not direct transcriptions; they are simply sufficiently large excerpts of copyrighted material that they go well beyond the limits of "fair use". Please read Copyrights and its discussion page for more information. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 14:42, 15 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Who gets to decide which jokes make the cut? Me?

I agree. It's not copyvio at ALL. Hedberg's jokes are strictly one liners, and are used at random and interchangeabley in his various acts/performances/cd's. I don't even think anyone really "owns" them other than himself. These are absolutely quotes of his (since they are individual one liners and aren't connected) in the same way jack handy's are. This isn't even an excerpt as Jeffq puts it because these quotes cannot be sourced to any one act. lighten up folks, besides the delivery of the jokes was the main part. Without hedbergs delivery style..they are just that. quotes. 90% of the humor is lost if you are just reading them online or in a book.


 * Well, you're wrong. Just because the page isn't a comprehensive reproduction of each of his shows does not mean it isn't a copyvio. You would still be violating copyright if you took a (copyrighted) book and republished it with the chapters in a different order, and you would still be violating copyright if you shuffled all the sentences in the book around. The same applies here; copyright is attached to the entirety of the show, and it's only by using small snippets of the original that this page may be considered non-infringing fair use. (I say "may" because there are no hard and fast rules about what is and is not fair use.) That the jokes are less funny when written than spoken has absolutely no effect on whether or not the page is copyvio. &mdash;LrdChaos 14:23, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Are you kidding me? Undermining a market for a quote book... First, you can't own rights to quotes. You can own rights to a recorded performance of Mitch, and a transcript of that performance might, might be violative of copyright. But even then... There are two copyright theories which I think apply. I urge the editors to consider these. First is originality... if a comedian repeats a quote multiple times, the copyright holders of the recorded performance cannot own that quote apart from their recording. It just goes against all that is copyright. In addition, words or short phrases cannot be copyrighted because they are not seen as original enough. This again applies to short joke quotes such as those seen on this page. Now, again I accede that a full transcript is copyrightable. Second is fair use. I think that Harper Row v. Nation Enterprises fully applies. In that case a rip-off magazine stole a few quotes from the same source, and it was found only to be copyright infringement because it 'took away the heart of what was originally copyrighted.' This is exactly the opposite. These are small phrases (see non-originality above) that are not linked to one another that do not take the heart from any recorded performance of Mitch's. I would go so far as to say if some schmuck did write a 'marketable quote book of Hedberg's material' (ha ha ha) that s/he would not own copyright to any of the quotes, only to the compilation as a whole. I find this page to be in no way violative of any theoretical copyright holder. --70.255.43.83 22:47, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Major makeover
I've just redone this page nearly from scratch, as I listened to Mitch All Together and then the "Comedy Central Presents" episode. As a result, I've been able to provide sources for all of the quotes now present, and rather than pick and choose which of the others to keep, I've just eliminated the entire "Unsourced" section. It may make sense to add an "Unsourced" section with only a few quotes, but please don't get carried away and add too many quotes to that section (I'll trim it periodically if it seems to be growing too large). —LrdChaos (talk) 21:27, 3 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I think this page was better when it had more jokes, even if they weren't sited. I think people may use this site to read Hedberg's funny jokes, not necessarily to use them in scholarly sources.


 * This was an evisceration. I miss all the jokes.

To those who have said (and to those who also feel, but have not said) that the page was "better" when it had more jokes, I understand your position, but it's important to note that Wikiquote is not a place for collecting all, or even a significant portion of, the jokes. The previous "version" of the page, full of jokes as it was, was almost certainly a copyright violation, and as such, was probably illegal and could have left Wikiquote/the Wikimedia Foundation open to being sued. This new "version", with significantly fewer full jokes, reduces that risk. The sourcing of the jokes is also better within the spirit of Wikiquote as a whole, which is to provide accurate, verifiable samplings of a person's material, whether it be a novel, a comedy routine, or a film. —LrdChaos (talk) 14:43, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

I used to come here for the jokes I couldn't here on his CDs, not they're gone. The other jokes came from live shows, you can't cite live shows.
 * Well, that isn't what Wikiquote is about. You're more than welcome to go back through the edit history for the article to read the jokes, and if you wanted, you could, under the GNU Free Documentation License, create your own site with that material (with proper attribution to Wikiquote editors as required by the license). When one thinks about what Wikiquote is, it's helpful to consider the sort of things you might find in a commercially-available book of quotations; while we don't have to worry as much about space, we still want to present quotes with sources whenever possible, so that people can be assured that a quote they're reading was actually said by someone, and they can be pointed to the original source to check for themselves.
 * With unreleased live shows, this is impossible. While someone could say that "oh, he told that joke on such-and-such a date", there's no way for anyone to verify that it was said, or that it's presented here the way it was told. When you consider that Mitch would sometimes tell the same joke with slight variations from time to time, it's a real problem to nail down a "right" version that anyone can be absolutely sure that he said. —LrdChaos (talk) 15:25, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
 * This major makeover is extremely awful. I am the person who originally organized the previous page into categories that made sense, and from what I could tell other people liked the categories. I agree with "unsigned2" (November 27) that I came here to see jokes that aren't on the CDs &mdash; I listen to the CDs but want to know more jokes! I don't really think it's right that this is supposed to be just a sampling of his work; this was the only web page on the internet that listed, well, everything. Now it's just in the history pages. Awful. This new page is worthless... if I wanted to know these jokes, I'd just listen to the CDs. I'll go copy an old history page and create a new website so people have a single location to get all great Mitch jokes. Visit Mitch-Jokes.com, everybody! This will be up in a day or so. Timneu22 23:38, 22 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Okay, folks. I'm getting a little tired of anonymous people making absurd claims about what isn't a copyright violation. None of the editors posting above except LrdChaos and myself has shown the least awareness of the complexities of copyright law, and none have demonstrated any care about whether this Wikiquote gets shutdown just like French Wikiquote did a year ago because of over-enthusiatic fans of a subject. It's been made clear, not only here but in the links evey registered user gets when they create a username, that Wikiquote's purpose is not and cannot be to collect substantial troves of quotes from any one subject — only select, pithy excerpts. If you don't like it, you can create you own website, as LrdChaos advised and as Timneu22 indicates has been done. There's even a good chance that that new site won't be sued for copyright violation because it is too obscure to attract legal attention. As a highly ranked, globally noted site, Wikiquote cannot afford this risk, and the Wikimedia Foundation which runs this site won't tolerate it if we Wikiquotians fail to prevent it. If you wish to continue to participate in this project, please read and follow the guidelines. Feel free to ask me specific questions on my talk page if you have them. Thank you for your attention. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 05:42, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Use of cite.php
I don't much care for the use of cite.php-style references here (or anywhere else on wikiquote, for that matter). To the extent that multiple quotations come from the same source, our guide suggests using sections to reduce the redundancy in citations. But I'm not going to undo it since this page is at least consistent, and whomever did it clearly put a lot of work into it. 121a0012 21:57, 25 November 2006 (UTC)


 * I was the one who did it (for the "Mitch All Together" section, anyway), because it was possible to get better granularity for sourcing the quotes in such a way as to make grouping them into a section illogical (if nothing else, having a subsection for each track on the CD would likely encourage people to include more quotes in each section, and start to put this page back near copyvio status). I suppose it might work to include the sources as subitems in the list; I might give that a try at some point to see how it looks, but feel free to try it out yourself and change it if you think it works better. —LrdChaos (talk) 23:36, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

mitch-jokes.com link
I've removed this again, and I'm going to continue to remove it so long as it violates several policies. For one, by copying what amounted to a copyright violation here, the site is then a copyright violation. From Wikipedia:Copyrights:
 * If you know that an external Web site is carrying a work in violation of the creator's copyright, do not link to that copy of the work. Knowingly and intentionally directing others to a site that violates copyright has been considered a form of contributory infringement in the United States (Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry).

As Jeffq said above, the new site probably isn't likely to end up being sued for copyright infringement, but only as long as it keeps a low profile. Linking to the site from Wikiquote (and much higher-traffic Wikipedia) is not going to keep a low profile.

Secondly, and much less of an issue next to the copyright problems, WP:EL and WP:COI both discourage people involved with a site from adding a link to that site to Wikimedia projects. From WP:EL:
 * You should avoid linking to a website that you own, maintain or represent, even if the guidelines otherwise imply that it should be linked. If the link is to a relevant and informative site that should otherwise be included, please consider mentioning it on the talk page and let neutral and independent Wikipedia editors decide whether to add it. This is in line with the conflict of interests guidelines.

Since it seems that the entire point of the site is to provide all of the quotes that were formerly here (which are almost certainly a copyright violation), it should not be added as a link until that site has taken steps to stop infringing on the copyright. —LrdChaos (talk) 14:16, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Copyvio once again
Okay, we're back into serious copyright violation again. The Mitch All Together section alone includes 63 quotes, which is about 1 per minute of audio. This is blatant copyvio. For the last time, Wikiquote is not the place to record everything interesting that someone says, but only a select set of the very best from a person or creative work.

As this article has a history of copyright violations, we're going to have to take more drastic action if the regular editors don't start demonstrating a willingness to follow Wikimedia rules about limited fair-use. If this article isn't trimmed to no more than 20 quotes per work (which is almost certainly too much as well, but will perhaps do as a first pass), I will personally remove enough material to get it down to this level. Since I'm not a fan of Hedberg and don't wish to spend considerable time evaluating each quote, the removals will probably be arbitrary and make everyone unhappy. (Be thankful — senior Wikimedians like Jimmy Wales have been known to blank a Wikiquote article for such violations. Arbitrary pruning is tame by comparison.)

I beg you all to save me this work and you this pain by bearing down and weeding out all but the very best of Mitch. I'll check back in a week or two. Thank you for your assistance and cooperation. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:33, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

How is that copyright violation? It's not audio, it's just written words. And if Wikiquote can't have so many of these jokes because of copyright violation, then why does it exist at all? --Jeffo bazoni


 * Wikiquote exists to quote selected statements from people's remarks and works, primarily those that people find the most notable. There is a good deal of leeway in fair-use provisions of US copyright law, but having a full or nearly full transcript of a comedian's routine definitely exceeds fair-use provisions, even for a non-profit endeavor. ~ Kalki 00:52, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

Does it make a difference if the comedian is dead? Jeffo bazoni


 * No. An artists copyrihts are legal assets, and they become the property of whomever s/he has willed them o upon their death. As Copyright points out, copyrights typiclly continue at least 50 years after the deah of the artist. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 09:43, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

So, what, probably, is an adequate amount of quotes for a page such as this? --Jeffo bazoni


 * There is no way to know for sure. (And if you think that's a frustrating answer for this article, think about how those of us who worry about all 10,000 articles fret. (See Copyrights and its talk page, which I've already mentioned above and which will continue to be the main place to see what the issues are, for some idea of what we're trying to accomplish.) I've already given you a first-pass target above. There are no guarantees that more action won't need to be taken later, but this would show at least some conscientious effort to reduce Wikiquote's exposure (and, not incidentally, make the article focus on a "very best of" set of quotes). ~ Jeff Q (talk) 15:29, 16 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, JeffQ mentioned that no more than 20 per work was his upper limit, and I'm certainly inclined to agree. To that end, I've made a couple of passes over the page and trimmed it down so that no section has more than 20 quotes. —LrdChaos (talk) 15:32, 16 July 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks, LrdChaos. Just to be clear, everyone, I wrote in no official or legal capacity when I suggested 20. One can easily interpret our informal guideline of 3-5 quotes per TV episode as having an comedy-album parallel of 3-5 quotes max. This kind of severe trimming is quite arguable. But I personally didn't want to be so ruthless unless we had more recent complaints, as long as regular editors of this article showed they could do the job of being selective. I hope that everyone here will monitor this article for excessive quoting, because I know LrdChaos works on a vast number of articles and tasks for Wikiquote, and shouldn't be expected to do all the difficult work on this one. Wikis work best when we each do our little bit. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 17:10, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

Update
We now appear to have consensus on a Limits on quotations guideline, under which this article will need further trimming. ~ Ningauble 13:16, 28 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Checking at the moment (Feb 2013), it says "Spoken-word (speeches, standup comedy, interviews, etc.): Five quotes maximum for any work not in the public domain." Ugh. Much trimming needed! Do you think there should be a disclaimer at the top of the page to discourage people from adding them back? 50.136.38.41 10:05, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
 * I am leery of adding more types of notes to editors within articles, but I have sometimes wondered whether this would be an appropriate use for Wikipedia's Editnotice feature. ~ Ningauble (talk) 16:33, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

Dufrenes?
How do you spell what you say [Doo-Fraynes]?

- I'm sure it's spelt "DuFranes" or "Dufranes"


 * It is Dufrenes - LS

"Dufresne" is well-known last name in Canada, and is pronounced Mitch's way. There have been many hockey players of note with that name. Search Dufresne at The Internet Hockey Database

Picture
Can someone upload a picture of Mitch. Thanks.

What does this mean?
"My belt holds up my pants and my pants have belt loops that hold up the belt. What the fuck’s really goin on down there? Who is the real hero?" I assume this is a joke. why? what does it mean?Kdammers (talk) 05:19, 25 December 2016 (UTC)