I have an underwater camera just in case I crash my car into a river, and at the last minute I see a photo opportunity.

This line comes from Mitch Hedberg’s stand-up persona and his late-1990s/early-2000s era of tightly constructed one-liners built on absurd premises and deadpan delivery. Hedberg often joked about consumer habits and the irrational “just in case” logic behind buying gadgets, pushing everyday preparedness to a surreal extreme. The scenario—keeping an underwater camera for the unlikely event of crashing into a river—fits his recurring comedic method: taking a familiar impulse (being ready, capturing moments) and colliding it with a catastrophically improbable situation, then treating it as practical planning.

The joke satirizes the way people rationalize purchases by inventing hypothetical emergencies or niche uses. Hedberg’s humor hinges on incongruity: a car crash into a river is a life-threatening disaster, yet the speaker’s priority becomes artistic opportunism—“a photo opportunity”—as if catastrophe were merely a chance to get a unique shot. The line also pokes fun at the romanticized idea of always being ready to create, exaggerating it until it becomes ridiculous. By presenting the thought calmly, Hedberg exposes how consumer preparedness and creative ambition can be comically self-centered when taken to extremes.