Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2006 4:49 pm Post subject: Steven Wright - "I never went away"
Wright here all along Comedian hasn't had a TV stand-up special in 15 years, but he insists he never went away
By MIKE MCDANIEL
2006
Houston Chronicle
Fifteen years is a long time, but to anyone in the entertainment business it's a career. Why did 15 years pass between Steven Wright's last television stand-up special and the one airing Saturday night? We put the question to the Boston comedian, and he delivered an answer in the deadpan monotone for which he's so famous.
"A comedian notices a lot of stuff. That's how you get the comedy, from noticing things. I do that. All comedians do that," he said, explaining how he collects his material. But there's a lot of things I don't notice. I didn't notice time going. I like to watch the audience walk into the theater before the show. Some are in their 30s, some in their 20s, but mainly it's 40s, 50s and 60s. And I started thinking, man, people who are in college now were 5 when I did my last special. I've been performing (at comedy clubs) straight through all this time. I thought, I should do another (TV special), for the people who already know me who haven't seen me in a while, and to reach these other people, a younger generation."
If The Man Who Skipped 15 Years says that's his story, then that's his story. But Wright would like you to know he never went away. He played comedy venues hither and yon and made TV appearances on the talk-show circuit, appearing Tuesday on Late Night With Conan O'Brien and in March on The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson.
"I love to write and perform, and I've been doing that the whole time," the 50-year-old comedian said in his "barimonotone" ? a baritone in monotone. "I get the rush of being in front of an audience. I wasn't thinking I should be on TV so I can reach this other level or stay 'up there.' What I was doing was fine for me. I was very content."
Apparently money was not an issue, either. TV concerts not only are lucrative but also hold out the promise of a DVD jackpot down the road. "I'm fine," Wright insisted. "I'm totally lucky to make a living from creativity. I know what you mean, if you went this other way you could make this gigantic amount of money. But I'd rather do what I'm doing."
What he's doing is what he's excelled at doing since 1982, playing one venue at a time. No comedian this side of George Carlin is as adept at finding the smart and funny in one- and two-sentence jokes.
?"Sometimes I talk to myself fluently in languages I'm not familiar with, just to screw with my subconscious."
?"What did Jesus ever do for Santa Claus on his birthday?"
?"Imagine Pulitzer Prize fighting."
?"She would drink so much she would slur her pauses."
?"My dog has a Web site. All it is is naked cats."
?"Next week I'm going to have an MRI to see if I have claustrophobia."
The marvel of Wright is not only the lines but also his low-key, no-worries delivery. Unlike Carlin, for example, he shows not a hint of anger in his act. Not too much current events, either.
"I know what's going on in the world, all the tragedies and horror and all this stuff on the news," he said. "But I like to talk about the little tiny things that people experience that they really don't talk about. Or I'll talk about gigantic things, like the expansion of the universe or the speed of light. But all this stuff in between, like mentioning a television show or the thing happening with the (Mark) Foley guy, I've always avoided all that stuff."
Keeping it clean and avoiding the headlines make Steven Wright: When the Leaves Blow Away (8 tonight, Comedy Central) all the more remarkable. It's chock-full of one-liners like those above. That's a lot of writing when you're on for an hour. Is the special, taped in Toronto, a way of emptying out and starting over?
"It does seem like (I have) a new canvas to work on since doing this," he said. "I keep adding jokes to what I do. I'll never come out of the blue with all-new hours. I make this living from telling jokes. ... I come from a regular, middle-class working family. For me to make a living doing this, as opposed to loading trucks or something, is amazing to me."
Five questions with comedian Steven Wright October 18, 2007
By Julie Hinds
www.freep.com
The last time Steven Wright put out an album, Ronald Reagan was president and "Miami Vice" was must-see TV. His new CD, "I Still Have a Pony," is his first since 1985's Grammy-nominated "I Have a Pony." So was it worth the wait? Oh, yes, especially if you like your comedy deadpan and gently warped. As always, Wright delivers precision-cut gems of one-liners like this: "A friend of mine has a trophy wife, but apparently it wasn't first place." He also catches up on the latest technology. "I bought an iPod," he says. "It can either hold 5,000 songs or one telephone message from my mother." The references may be up to date, but the formula remains the same. He still talks in the flat monotone of an existential everyman, and he still twists ordinary topics into hilarious pretzels of unexpected logic. After all these years, Wright, who's set to perform Thursday at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, is still getting the job done. What else is there to say about this odd, influential, Oscar-winning (for a 1988 short film) stand-up legend? Only that this is what funny sounds like, in any decade.
QUESTION: You've talked about wanting to reach a younger audience. I wondered if you changed anything in your material to do that, or are you just interested in current things like technology?
ANSWER: I just noticed over the years there weren't many high school or early 20s people in my audience. The people who are in college now, they were only 5 when I did my last HBO special. So I wanted to have something for the people who already know me, and try to reach more people. But I didn't try to change the jokes to fit them. I've always talked about technology, even when I started. Twenty years ago, I was talking about answering machines. Now I'm talking about iPods and HD-ADD (high-definition attention deficit disorder).
Q: How old were you when you realized your brain works the way it does?
A: I started fooling around with words in junior high, playing with meanings. I didn't really know I was going to write jokes like this until ... I was 23. I didn't know my mind was looking at stuff like this until I was going to go down to the comedy club and go to the audition night. Two weeks before, I started writing material, and it just came out like this. I was influenced by two of my favorite comedians. ... I loved how Woody Allen wrote jokes and I loved how George Carlin observed everyday things. And I loved surrealism, too, surrealistic paintings.
Q: When you started out, what was the reaction of other comics? Were they envious?
A: In the beginning, a lot of the jokes didn't work, so they weren't: 'Oh my God, who's this guy?' Even now, when I try new jokes, only one in three will work enough to stay in the act. So they saw me slowly develop. I didn't come on and kill at all. I had to struggle and learn how to do it and slowly get better over time.
Q: Everyone asks if your delivery onstage is similar to your regular speaking voice, and it seems that it very much is.
A: Yeah, it's just how I speak. I laugh a lot more in real life. Onstage, I'm trying to remember my act, so I have this straight face. I was really nervous being onstage when I started, so that also had me have a straight face.
Q: But if, like, someone cuts you off in traffic, do you react loudly?
A: '(BLEEP) YOU!' Yes, I would. Definitely. ... I think road rage should be legal.
Academy Award Winner Steven Wright is a prototype comedian that many others continually try to follow. Steven got his big break and was booked for his first "Tonight Show" appearance on Friday, August 6, 1982. The king of late night enjoyed the performance so much he invited Steven to appear again the following Thursday, a rarity on "The Tonight Show." His back-to-back appearances helped put his fledgling career into high gear. The comic soon found himself performing his off-beat routines on "Saturday Night Live," "Late Night with David Letterman," and numerous trips back to "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson."
Wright expanded his comedy career to include comedy albums, film and television appearances. His 1985 debut album, I Have A Pony, earned him a Grammy nomination. In 1985, Steven starred in his first HBO Special "A Steven Wright Special." In 1989, Steven was honored with an Academy Award for Best Short Film for his film entitled "The Appointments of Dennis Jennings" in which he starred and co-wrote. Other stars of the film included "Roseanne's" Laurie Metcalf and British comedian, Rowan Atkinson. In September of 1990, Steven starred in his second standup special for HBO called "Wicker Chairs and Gravity." The special included stand-up from The Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto and a short film shot on location in New York and New Jersey.
Steven has been seen in numerous films including "Desperately Seeking Susan," Mike Meyers' "So I Married An Axe Murderer," Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers," and Nora Ephron's "Mixed Nuts." Steven was the voice of the DJ, K-Billy in "Reservoir Dogs" and starred with John Cleese and Jack Palance in New Line's animated film, "The Swan Princess" as the voice of Speed, the turtle. Steve also appeared as a sitcom actor in MGM's "Speechless" with Harry Shearer, and as a Mountie in the MGM release "Canadian Bacon", opposite the late John Candy.
In 1999, Steven played a guest starring role in Albert Brooks' film "The Muse" starring Brooks, Sharon Stone, Andie MacDowell, and Jeff Bridges. In '98 he played a supporting role in Dave Chappelle's "Half-Baked" and was a featured voice in "Babe 2: Pig in the City". Steven wrote, directed and stars in the 1999 short film, "One Soldier," the story of a man obsessed with the unanswerable questions in life. The film was screened at numerous film festivals and can be seen on the Independent Film Channel. Steven has recently been seen in the Jim Jarmusch film "Coffee and Cigarettes" and the film "The Aristocrats."
In October of 2006, Steven premiered the hour special, "When The Leaves Blow Away," on Comedy Central. The special was released on DVD in April 2006 by Image Entertainment and includes Steven's 1999 short film "One Soldier" and a segment of a 1988 performance at a Boston comedy club.
Steven's second CD, "I Still Have A Pony," was released by Comedy Central Records on September 25, 2007. The CD earned Steven his second Grammy Award nomination for Best Comedy Album. Steven was honored as the first inductee into The Boston Comedy Hall of Fame on December 15, 2008. The ceremony included performances by legendary Boston comedians Tony V, Don Gavin, Lenny Clarke, Kenny Rogerson, Steve Sweeney, Mike Donovan, Barry Crimmins, Mike McDonald and Fran Solomita.
On June 2, 2009, Warner Bros. Records re-released Steven's groundbreaking, Grammy nominated first CD, "I Have A Pony," packaged with Steven's first HBO special, "A Steven Wright Special" on DVD; part of Warner Bros. Records 50th anniversary celebration.
Steven Wright is a regular guest with David Letterman, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel and Craig Ferguson. He continues touring the U.S., Canada and overseas.
Interview: Steven Wright
Mike Weatherford
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Jan. 20, 2012
You know you're talking to Steven Wright the second you hear that just-woke-up voice on the phone. But you wonder if his mind works in the same bizarre, off-kilter way it does onstage. Sometimes, yes.
No surprise the comedian famous for deadpan one-liners would cite Kurt Vonnegut as "one of my heroes." Meeting the late author was "one of the most exciting things in my life." The two became friendly enough to share phone numbers. "I was in London one time at a house Charles Dickens had lived in for two years. It was like a museum thing. I think he wrote 'Nicholas Nickleby' in the house. And down in the basement of the house there was a gift shop with a pay phone there. I tried to call Kurt Vonnegut from Charles' Dickens house."
You ask what makes a comedian laugh? This memory does it for him. "Just for the absolute insanity of being in one genius's house from another century, calling another genius. But (Vonnegut) wasn't home. He had no machine, so it just rang and rang. That's complete surrealism, even though it's all real," he adds, beginning with "the fact that there's even a phone in Charles Dickens' house."
Wright has become a perennial at The Orleans, serving up his signature one-liners: "The other day I was -- no wait, that wasn't me." Or, "I have the ability to levitate birds. But no one cares." Those jokes from his 1997 milestone album, "I Have a Pony," would seem to be a prototype for Twitter. But when Wright started a Twitter account himself, what did he do? Start to write a short story in serialized bursts, that's what. More Dickens than Vonnegut, it turns out.
Was that his idea of a joke? The ultimate in defying expectations? Mocking the trendy new medium? "Some people left messages: 'What the hell is this?' 'I thought this would be perfect for you.' 'Doesn't he know how this is supposed to work?' " It wasn't that calculated, he says. The less-devious inspiration was rereading a short story he once wrote for Rolling Stone.
With everyone else trying to be Steven Wright on Twitter, "Something about it didn't interest me. I'm trying to break it down for you and I can't get much further than that," he says. It's not so much the idea of giving up jokes he can use in his act for free, as much as those jokes needing to be said out loud. "Without the person involved, me and the audience, it's kind of like, just laying there."
That said, don't think his time with Vonnegut didn't plant the seed of committing his absurdist humor to print. Vonnegut "told me that if you can get to 70 pages, then it just goes. Most people can't get to the 70 pages." For now, Wright sticks to his stand-up dates and rereading Vonnegut. "I just read (the novels) occasionally because I need to read it. His imagination just jazzes me up. It's just so alive and fertile, it just makes me feel good to read an imagination I absolutely admire. It still affects me like I was in college and I read them. Wow, what an angle on the world."
Wright says he's never tried to add up how many jokes he's written over the years, and doesn't think about it until someone asks him. He's not jealous of other comedians who work long-form and can stretch a yarn instead of landing four or five jokes per minute. "I started out doing it like that, and it wasn't until years later that I realized how dense it was compared to other people," he says. "By then it was already what I was doing naturally."
Wright has been working Las Vegas since at least 1997, when he played the Sahara. The old showroom there had been home to comedic idols such as Don Rickles and Buddy Hackett. "My initial reaction was like, 'I don't know if I fit in there.' It just had another generation vibe to it. But I did it anyway. They didn't have to convince me over years or anything," he remembers. "But then when I went there, my generation was already going there. My comedian peers, I mean."
Las Vegas, he says, is "like a big spaceship flew over. A big gigantic spaceship and it took a turn, it was too quick, and part of the ship fell off, onto the ground, and that's Las Vegas. I like how stimulating visually it is, and the sound and light and weirdness. It's just so surrealistic," says this expert on such things.
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