I don’t have a girlfriend. But I do know a woman who’d be mad at me for saying that.

This line comes from Mitch Hedberg’s stand-up act, delivered in his characteristic deadpan, one-liner style in the late 1990s–early 2000s. Hedberg often mined everyday language for comic ambiguity, and relationship labels (“girlfriend,” “woman I know”) were a recurring topic in his routines. The joke plays like an offhand confession to the audience, as if he’s clarifying his romantic status, then immediately undercutting it with the implication that he is in a relationship but avoids (or resists) the conventional label. It reflects the persona he cultivated onstage: candid, slightly evasive, and amused by the way words can create social consequences.

Hedberg’s joke hinges on a quick reversal: he denies having a girlfriend, then immediately admits there is a woman who would object to that denial—implying a relationship without naming it. The humor comes from the gap between legalistic wording (“I don’t have a girlfriend”) and lived reality (someone considers herself his girlfriend). It also plays on social expectations about commitment and labels: the speaker tries to evade responsibility through semantics, but the punchline reveals that relationships are defined as much by the other person’s understanding as by one’s own. The line exemplifies Hedberg’s deadpan, logic-twist style, where a seemingly straightforward statement collapses under its own implications.