There is no father to the stand-up style of comedian Steven Wright. Wright exploded on the comedy scene in the early '80s, eschewing conventional setups and punchlines in favor of bizarre observations and absurdist one-liners delivered in a bored monotone. Wright's one comedy album, 1985's I Have A Pony, earned a Grammy nomination, while his 1988 short film The Appointments Of Dennis Jennings—which he co-wrote and starred in—made him an unlikely Academy Award-winner.
Wright has lent his voice to Reservoir Dogs, The Simpsons, Babe: Pig In The City, and Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, and he's appeared in such notable cult films as Desperately Seeking Susan, Natural Born Killers, and Coffee And Cigarettes. Wright recently starred in Comedy Central's Steven Wright: When The Leaves Blow Away, his first stand-up special since 1991's Wicker Chairs And Gravity. The A.V. Club recently spoke with Wright about winning an Oscar, the craft of comedy, making movies, and his influence on younger comedians.
The A.V. Club: A good place to start would be at the very beginning. Tell me about your childhood.
Steven Wright: I don't know if you're kidding me or not. Well, okay. It was kind of suburbs, rural, in-between, really. It was regular, you know—Little League and skiing, going to elementary school, junior high, high school. All pretty regular stuff, about 30 minutes outside of Boston.
AVC: You've said you were very introverted as a child.
SW: Oh yeah, I was very introverted. I was very little, too. I grew like three inches after I got out of high school, so I was always one of the smallest kids in the school.
AVC: Did you feel like an outsider growing up?
SW: Not really. You have the normal wondering-where-you-fit-in feeling, everyone does growing up. I don't think I really knew the term "outsider." I don't think I realized I was an outsider until college.
AVC: Did you feel like you perceived the world in a different way than other people?
SW: No, I didn't. I loved words; I would put groups of words together, like "a flock of false teeth," I would say to my friends, just because it was a strange set of words. But I didn't think I had a different angle or anything.
AVC: When did you realize you wanted to make people laugh professionally?
SW: I was a huge fan of Johnny Carson and The Tonight Show. I started watching that when I was 14; I started watching it every night. There was also a radio show in Boston, and the guy played two entire comedy albums every Sunday night. And I had a little radio in bed with me Sunday nights, so I would hear every album, almost every album ever made. It was right about that time, watching The Tonight Show and listening to that radio show, that George Carlin's Class Clown album came out. I thought, "Man, I would like to be one of those guys who goes on TV, who goes on the Johnny Carson show."
AVC: What did you study in college?
SW: I went to a junior college studying liberal arts for two years, and then I transferred to Emerson College, focusing on mass communications, specifically radio, thinking maybe I could be on the radio. [Comedy] was my fantasy, but I didn't think it would really happen, so I thought, "Well, I can go to school, maybe I can be funny on the radio." I didn't really know how radio worked. I thought the guy just went in there and played whatever he wanted. The more I learned about it, the more structured I realized it was. I thought I'd be a guy just fooling around for four hours on the radio.
AVC: What was it like performing for the first time on stage?
SW: Well, I really wanted to do this, but I was very introverted. So before I went up, my legs were shaking. I was scared out of my mind. I just did the three minutes I had prepared, and I had no expression, because I was so nervous. I don't even know if I knew to slow down and wait for them to laugh; I may have just talked straight through. They laughed at about half of the stuff, and I was up there for three minutes. Very nervous. And I was disappointed, because I was imagining they would laugh at all of it, which was insane. There's no way they could laugh at everything. When you try out new jokes, that never happens. So there was a guy, a fellow college student who was doing stand-up already for several months, and he said that I did fine. I never did it before, and half the stuff that I did wasn't laughed at, and he said that I should just go home and rewrite the other stuff and come back again. So that switched in my mind how I looked at it, and I thought, "Wow, he's right." And then I thought, "I've wanted to do this for so many years, and I actually made the audience laugh at something I thought of," so I was inspired to go back. So that interaction with him, his name was Mike McDonald, that really affected how I looked at it.
AVC: When you did your three minutes of material, was it the same kind of comedy that you have today?
SW: It was, about half or three-quarters of it. There was other stuff that was more normal-like; I can't remember exactly. It wasn't totally surreal and abstract. It was a mixture.
AVC: When you started, did you realize that you were performing an entirely new kind of comedy?
SW: No, I was just trying to think up things that were funny that I thought the audience would laugh at. I didn't see it as a style. It wasn't until a year or two later that The Boston Phoenix… Some guy wrote an article about me that said, "Oh, he's deadpan and he's doing these types of jokes." I never even thought of myself as deadpan. I never heard that word used to refer to me in my whole life. So he made me see it from the outside. But I wasn't thinking "I'm breaking new ground" or anything, I was just trying to, like I said, build up new material.
AVC: You've said that you tend to throw away jokes if the audience doesn't respond well three times. Are there any jokes that you really loved and were attached to, but that audiences just didn't respond to?
SW: Yeah, it's hard for me—your mind doesn't remember a lot of those, because they don't work, they don't take a place in your head. But there's one that I left in on and off for years. It barely got a laugh, and I don't do it anymore, but I had it in and out for years because I liked it. It was, "You never know what you have until it's gone, and I wanted to know what I had, so I got rid of everything."
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