Jorge Rios
Comedian Steven Wright on stage.
Steven Wright
Steven Wright is a comedian. He’s been telling jokes for 43 years, with an instantly recognizable style: dry, flat delivery of observational one-liners and sometimes surreal jokes that don’t go where you expect them to. Yet everything is adorned with a sense of wonder, and all of it comes from a tall, imposing figure with long, curly brown hair.
Wright carved a niche for himself early in his career and rode it to wild success. His two comedy albums each garnered a Grammy nomination, and he’s also received two Emmy nominations for television production. He even won an Oscar for writing, producing and starring in a short film called The Appointments of Dennis Jennings in 1988!
Isthmus spoke to Wright by phone ahead of his Oct. 8 stop at the Barrymore Theatre, and he was as monotone as ever.
Wright is considered a legend in the comedy scene; a cursory Google search finds the word mentioned at least once in any story about him. That doesn’t seem to faze him much, though, as Wright considers himself just a man telling jokes. “I’m just a guy out there doing it,” he says. Despite the massive success, Wright makes sure to keep himself grounded. He’s still amazed that he can “make a living from [his] imagination” — and he “really appreciates it.”
As a 16-year-old, Wright was inspired by seeing comics like Richard Pryor, George Carlin and Robert Klein perform on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. When he saw them talking about things they just noticed, and it was all funny stuff, that was a revelation. Wright got the idea of stand-up comedy stuck in his head, and it never left. “Most fantasies don’t come true like that,” he says. “It’s like a kid saying he wants to be a baseball player or an astronaut.”
Not much has changed about doing comedy over the years, says Wright. The biggest change for him has been the introduction of social media. Wright hasn’t been active on social media for six years. "To me, jokes are supposed to be seen and heard in front of an audience” — posting jokes online just isn’t the same. Wright enjoys the validation he feels when people laugh at the jokes he’s written, and he feels pride in his performance.
Performing is still “intense, and electric, and interesting,” he says, and he genuinely enjoys the attention that comes from getting up on stage, despite his seemingly sometimes sullen demeanor. “It makes you feel alive,” he says.
What makes a joke to a guy like Steven Wright, anyway? How do these one-liners come to be? Observe the world around you, he says. “From the minute you wake up,‘til you go to sleep, there's thousands of pieces of information, like a mosaic painting is floating past you,” he says.
“You know the air traffic control at the airport?” he asks, comparing his mind to a radar interface. “I’m just noticing things…I’m not trying to find a joke, sure, but in my noticing of things, it’s like that [radar] arm is sweeping around, and those blips, the things I notice, are, rather than planes, possible jokes.”
The legendary comedian shares one final nugget of accrued, award-winning wisdom: “All art is you reacting to the world. Music, painting, books, anything is someone reacting to their experience of life.”
