The Surreal Life

Comedian Steven Wright has spent the past two decades traveling city to city offering up small pearls of wisdom. He appears in New Brunswick May 18.

By: Jim Boyle
"Steven

Oddball comedian Steven Wright appears at the State Theatre in New Brunswick May 18.


   With a round of applause, a man ambles onto the stage. He paces slowly back and forth as the noise dies down. He suddenly stops, looks at the crowd and says something like, "I went into a restaurant. The menu said, ‘breakfast any time.’ So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance."
   Part of the room laughs immediately, another section has to take a second to think about the joke, then starts to chime in, while the rest simply don’t get it. He continues to cross the stage, stops, and says something else like, "If you were going to shoot a mime, would you use a silencer?" Now, a different group gets it, while others are once again confused. This is the typical Steven Wright show, and that’s the way it’s always been.
   "Right from the beginning the reaction was mixed," he says in his signature monotone drone. "Some were supportive of it, some weren’t. The audience wasn’t really thrown by the style. They don’t care, as long as it’s funny. I never thought about changing the delivery. Only the material, if it didn’t work."
   The 47-year-old has spent the past two decades traveling city to city offering up small pearls of wisdom. Mr. Wright makes a stop in New Brunswick May 18, appearing at the State Theatre.
   "I don’t like the travel," he says. "But I love doing the show, and I have to go to where the show is. I try to do a schedule where I don’t get pulled all over the place."
   By now, audiences know what to expect when they see Steven Wright. An act that’s been given such names as strange, off-kilter, deadpan, or just plain weird.
   "The words don’t bother me," he says. "I can see where they get that. It’s just people writing down what they saw. If I was driving a white car with a bad muffler, I can’t complain and say the car should be green and the muffler is fine."
   Since starting out in 1980, following his graduation from Emerson College in Boston, Mr. Wright’s world has operated independently from current events, focusing instead on life’s incongruities. While many people were concerned about the Cold War and the economy, Mr. Wright was wrestling with concepts such as torturing his houseplants by watering them with ice cubes, writing an unauthorized autobiography and wondering what to add to powdered water.
   "My material is kind of surreal," he says. "It overlaps different realities. It could be described as weird, but the thing is, when you compare it to what’s really happening in the world, it isn’t that weird."
   At first, Mr. Wright was a little nervous about being on stage. In fact, he rushed through much of his act. After about eight months of constant performing, he had become comfortable with his style. In 1982, he got his first big break when he appeared on The Tonight Show. He was an instant hit with Johnny Carson and the viewing audience.
   As his act developed, Mr. Wright felt more of a need to plan it out. Initially, he would just walk on stage and choose from a mental catalog of jokes and one-liners. However, the backlog began to overflow with ideas. Not every punch line, however, makes the cut.
   "There got to be so many jokes it was out of control," he says. "Now, I like to know most of the order of what I’ll be doing. Otherwise, I’ll come on stage with this bizarre memory chest.
   "I am my first audience. If I think of something that makes me laugh, I’ll share it with the audience. There’s some line in my brain. The thing has to be at some kind of level or I won’t write it down. I’m a pretty tough critic."
   As the years progressed, his stage and television appearances became more prolific. During that time, he began to dabble in other mediums with incredible results. In 1985, he released his only album, I Have a Pony, which earned a Grammy nomination. After small appearances in films such as Desperately Seeking Susan and Coffee and Cigarettes, he tried his hand in screenwriting. He penned the script for the short film, The Appointments of Dennis Jennings, in which he co-starred with Laurie Metcalf and Rowan Atkinson. The 30-minute comedy about a paranoid waiter’s obsession with his shrink earned Mr. Wright an Academy Award for best short film.
   "We originally made it to go on HBO," he says. "We didn’t make it to go in theaters, but when we gave the film to HBO, they released it to the theaters. It was like throwing a dart at a board, but a gust of wind grabbed the dart and sent it a hundred miles away into the middle of this other board."
   Despite the numerous accolades, Mr. Wright only wrote one other film since the Oscar win. Another short film, 1999’s One Soldier, also marked his directorial debut; it was about a Civil War soldier contemplating the meaning of life while standing in front of a firing squad. While his personal film projects are rare, his acting credits continue to multiply. He’s made appearances in such movies as So I Married an Axe Murder, Half-Baked, Natural Born Killers and The Muse, as well as television shows like Mad About You, The Larry Sanders Show and The Simpsons.
   Until recently, one medium Mr. Wright had a tumultuous relationship with was the Internet. In the early stages of its heyday, one of the most popular places to visit on the Web were sites with lists of Mr. Wright’s jokes. The only problem was, many of them weren’t his. Now, armed with his own Web site, Mr. Wright has become a little more comfortable with technology. He hasn’t quite embraced it, he just has the bare minimum.
   "I just use it carefully," he says. "With answering machines, cell phones and e-mail, if I don’t watch out, I’ll have 9,000 people I have to get back to. If someone can’t reach me one way, I don’t want them to have 75 other ways. Soon, they’ll try to install a chip into my brain and communicate with me through that."
Steven Wright will perform at the State Theatre, 15 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, May 18, 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $20-$32. For information, call (732) 246-7469. On the Web: www.statetheatrenj.org. Steven Wright on the Web: www.stevenwright.com