Steven Wright

We are taking it back this week to an older, much more established and revered comedian. He is the grandfather of deadpan comedy. His style is unique and many young comics have been very clearly inspired by him. This week I will discuss the life of Steven Wright and my own personal opinion on his work.

Biography:

Steven Alexander Wright was born in Massachusetts in 1955. He has three other siblings, an Italian mother, and a Scottish father. According to this website here, at a young age Wright became very interested in comics like Bill Cosby and George Carlin. He would listen to the local comedy radio station and listen to their albums very frequently. Apparently he was so intrigued by Cosby and Carlin’s work that he would memorize and perform their sets for his classmates and friends. After obtaining his associate degree in a community college following his high school years, he then transferred to Emerson College. Upon graduating, Wright joined The Comedy Connection, a club in Boston. During this time, as noted by Best Comedy Online.com, in addition to making people laugh, Wright recorded numerous non-comedic songs with his friend and had an interest in painting. In 1982 his life was about to change in a major way. Peter Lassally, who was the executive producer for Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show happened to stop by Ding-Ho, a comedy club in the area. He caught Wright performing a set and immediately booked him on the show. On the show, Carson asked Wright to join him on the couch, which was a ginormous deal. After that episode, Carson told the up-and-coming star to come back the next week which, once again, was a rarity. Following that big break, Wright was asked to be on Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. Then in 1985 he released a Warner Bro. Records comedy album titled I Have a Pony. This piece was praised and even received a Grammy nomination. The fame he gained from the album landed him an hour long HBO special, which was recorded during a college performance. His cult-like following gained a lot more members once this point in his career hit. His growth and success is admirable and almost unbelievable. He even succeeded in filmmaking where he won an Academy Award for his 30-minute short titled The Appointments of Dennis Jennings. Wright continued to record more albums and create more specials. For a while he found his home in only performing live in theaters. As expected, all his shows were sold out because that was the only way anyone could hear his talent. However, he made a return to television in the early 2000s and in 2008 he became the first inductee to the Boston Comedy Hall of Fame.

*Wright preforming one of his stand-up routines.*

Review:

My exploration of Steven Wright taught me so many things about comedy. Obviously his jokes are spectacular and his skills are exceptional, but simply learning about his unique style of joke-telling has created a basis for a comedy vocabulary that I not only find interesting, but also helpful when assessing other comics. For example, a major aspect to Wright’s sets are using paraprosdokians. The word itself is a mouthful, but it’s just a figure of speech where the latter part of the sentence is unexpected or so absurd that it makes the listener reinterpret the first part. An example of this would be the phrase “Where there is a will, I want to be in it”. So the first part of the sentence makes you think the second half will follow with “there is a way”, as that is how the inspirational quote usually goes. But the almost anticlimactic latter half changes the meaning of the word ‘will’ to mean someone’s final wishes. This skews the joke to be unexpectedly selfish and dark rather positive as one would initially expect. Wright has a lot of jokes that follow this figure of speech and it fits so well into his one-liner style of telling jokes. Another example of a joke that Wright likes to tell a lot is called a non sequitur. In Latin this phrase means “it does not follow”. Here the conclusion of a sentence usually does not connect with the rest of the sentence. It’s a sort of literary and intentional fallacy that is found to be very funny in conjunction with clever word play. Wright uses this very skillfully in order to take a simple few sentences and make them hilarious with a witty and illogical conclusion. Aside from all the vocabulary I have been aware of from listening to and researching Wright, just having a laugh at his content is fantastic as well. He has an ironical and deadpan sense of humor, which pairs nicely with his iconic tired and melancholy delivery. It’s a great contrast because he sounds so bored but performs hilarious material and on top of this, he rarely breaks character. His jokes are usually quite short and require paying attention as most of it is word-play and contrived scenarios. As a millennial it can sometimes be hard to follow certain topics that he discusses because I can’t relate to them, but still lots of his jokes are universal and timeless. He also has so many quick jokes in one show that you’re bound to enjoy most of them. As per usual I will link my favorites below so you can possibly even learn a bit, but more importantly… laugh it up!