Don’t expect to get a rise out of Steven Wright. Despite a bountiful stand-up career that’s spanned more than 30 years, he’s still the same.
Long before Lady Gaga, he was rocking the poker face.
Although he’s a comedic icon without loud elation or arrogance, Wright’s resume includes a pair of Grammy nominations, an Oscar, a slew of TV and film appearances, and countless live shows. A recent phone conversation revealed his naturally subdued demeanor, proving his stage persona is basically himself dialed down a few clicks.
The college kids who first fell for him in the ’80s are now middle age. They’re sitting next to high school and university students at Wright’s shows today. Like an endearing song, his surreal statements and mind-bending answers to wacky questions prove ageless.
“It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.”
This classic quip and seemingly endless new ones keep Wright relevant. Although his expression doesn’t always show it, he’s gratefully delighted.
Your comedy’s always been equal parts over-the-top and cerebral. Do you have any sort of joke-writing ritual?
No. When I started [doing stand-up comedy] I sat down for the first six months and I would try to write jokes, and I did. After that, I didn’t do that anymore. I would just do it by noticing things. All comedy, all art really, is based on what’s really happening even if you twist it around. So anyway I have no ritual, I just go through my life and I’ll notice little things. … The world is like a mosaic painting, little tiny pieces of information. And some of it can be linked together that wasn’t linked together before, but there’s this surreal meaning to it.
Having done this for years, have you conditioned your brain to the point where you’re more aware?
Exactly. After I was doing [stand-up] for about eight months to a year, it was like I was doing push-ups in my brain as far as noticing things. Now I’m not walking down the street trying to notice things, it’s automatic. It’s like scanning, and I’m very aware of the details. I paint abstract, but I used to draw and paint very realistically growing up in elementary through high school. When you draw something and try to make it real, you notice things you wouldn’t really notice if you weren’t trying to draw it real. If there was a bottle on a table beside a vase, if you were going to paint that you would see the bottle and the vase, but you’d also see the shape of the space in between the bottle and the vase. You wouldn’t normally look at that unless you were painting it. I was exercising my mind by drawing not knowing that later on that would tie in to noticing things for comedy.
Your trademark is obviously your deadpan delivery. Have you ever felt confined?
I don’t feel confined. I feel just lucky about my whole career. I feel lucky that I think this way, that I wrote and write those type jokes. With how I speak, that’s just how I talk. I laugh in real life and stuff, but when I went on stage I was so afraid and I was concentrating so much that I was just trying to say the joke the right way, which I still am now. That’s why I have a serious face. I’m trying to say it exactly right and know what the next one is. So I feel lucky that that way of thinking matched with how I speak. And I don’t feel like it confined me. I don’t worry that someone’s not calling me to be a wired-up lawyer in some movie. I never set out to be an actor. I set out to do stand-up.
8 p.m. Feb. 9. $32.50 plus Ticketmaster fees. Variety Playhouse, 1099 Euclid Ave., Atlanta. 800-745-3000, www.ticketmaster.com.
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