Life's Pleasures Quote by Mitch Hedberg

Hedberg turns confession into a linguistic magic trick: a sentence that loops back on itself and dares you to notice the mechanism. The first clause cues the standard redemption arc - “I used to do drugs” is the opening note of a cautionary tale, the kind that ends with sobriety, wisdom, and a slow clap from daytime TV. Then he snaps the narrative spine in half: “I still do drugs.” The laugh comes from the sudden refusal to perform moral progress, but the real punchline is the add-on, “But I used to, too,” which weaponizes grammar. He’s not contradicting himself; he’s insisting on a timeline so obvious it becomes absurd. If you still do something, you also used to do it. The line exposes how much of everyday speech is filler posing as information.

Hedberg’s specific intent is misdirection: he invites the audience to project meaning (rehabilitation, shame, transformation) and then punishes that projection with a purely logical, almost childlike clarification. That’s his signature - jokes that feel like stoner thoughts, but are engineered with a mathematician’s economy.

The subtext is bigger than drugs. It’s a rejection of the expectation that public confession must be instructive, improving, or marketable. In the early-2000s stand-up landscape, when comedians were increasingly pressured into “truth” and therapeutic autobiography, Hedberg makes “truth” into syntax, not virtue. The line lands because it’s simultaneously candid and unserious: a performer admitting vice while also admitting, basically, that our stories about vice are often just narrative habits we’ve learned to applaud.