It's OK to say most comedians are depressing and frightening -- nobody knows that better than comedians. When they aren't joking about how pathetic they are, well, it's unclear what they're doing. They say weird things about breasts. They make dumb thumping noises into the microphone. They point at fat people in the audience and talk about how old the Rolling Stones are. They squeeze their bland misanthropy into 10 minutes of sarcasm and you turn off the TV with a shudder. Mitch Hedberg is here just in time. He makes people laugh.

The 32-year-old Minnesota native is kind and thoughtful and sort of hip, and says gentle things about cute animals and food. It's working, too. He's been on "Letterman" seven times, he has a CD, his headline shows sell out and he had a small part in last year's "Almost Famous." (In the scene, he smoked fake pot with Peter Frampton, which he says is even better than smoking real pot with someone who looks like Peter Frampton.)

With his long hair, dark glasses and slow, amiable grin, Hedberg will have you convinced he's just another dope fobbing off boring pot humor at first. If he makes one joke about getting high, he has said, people will approach him after the show and ask why he only talks about drugs.

He doesn't. Like most comedians, he talks about everyday things. The difference is that he seems to earnestly enjoy the funniness of eggs or tightrope walkers or frozen bananas. His goodwill, which in real life would seem ordinary, is shocking in front of a red curtain.

"My apartment is infested with koala bears. It is the cutest infestation. When I turn on the light, they scatter, but I do not want them to."

Of course it's more than just niceness. He's also funny and extremely offbeat -- something that gets him compared to Steven Wright a good deal. On paper, Hedberg does sound like Wright. He inflects observational humor with kookiness and skips the narrative setup. It's in the delivery that he leaves Wright in the dust. If Wright's superdrollness amounts to something of a joke-telling robot, Hedberg never lets you forget there's a ghost, or at least a frog lover, in the machine. With his chuckling, awkward pauses and apologies for confusing non sequiturs ("sorry, that last part didn't make no sense"), he comes across as vulnerable and real.

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"I love Steven Wright," he told Shecky magazine, "but as far as him being an influence, I can't measure that. Let me say this: If I made potato chips, and I decided to pack them in a skinny can, people would say I was like Pringle's, but what if I packed them in a bag?"

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