Steven Wright

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Steven Wright in 1994

Like my daddy used to say, "worst comes to worst, we're screwed".

Boston comedian with a trademark deadpan delivery. His act consists of a series of short, surreal statements with odd internal logic, such as "I woke up one morning to find that everything in my apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica", "I put instant coffee in the microwave and almost went back in time", or "I bought a packet of instant water but I didn't know what to add". Sometimes he throws in bizarre songs or rambling anecdotes that go absolutely nowhere.

Steven Wright provides examples of the following tropes:
  • Black Comedy: His song "Friends Of Mine" details a number of his former friends' deaths.
    • "One time I was playing poker with Tarot Cards. I got a full house and four people died."
  • Blatant Lies: "I'm feeling kinda hyper tonight."
  • Butterfly of Doom: Averted. "I was wondering how my life would have been different if I'd been born one day earlier, and I thought maybe it wouldn't be different at all, except that I'd have asked that question yesterday."
  • Catch Phrase: He starts all of his sets with a tired and unenthusiastic "Thanks..." in response to his introductory applauses.
  • Cloudcuckoolander: Even though his delivery's so deadpan, he is still clearly not on the same track as most people.
  • Crazy Awesome: "Imagine Pulitzer Prizefighting. Just two writers beating the shit out of each other."
  • Comically Missing the Point: "I was driving and saw a hitchhiker with a sign that said 'Heaven', so I hit him. I think he went there; he seemed like a nice guy."
  • Deadpan Snarker
  • Literal-Minded: A large portion of his one-liners. "Twenty-four hour banking? I don't have time for that."
  • Precision F-Strike: He uses this a couple times in his CD "I Still Have A Pony", in contrast to his previous album in which he didn't swear at all.
  • Poor Communication Kills: "Eddie was a friend of mine, he was killed playing Checkers / You know that term 'king me'? The other guy wasn't sure what he said."
  • Schedule Slip: His second comedy CD was released in 2007, twenty-two years after his last one. A few years earlier, he explained the long gap:

When I made I Have a Pony, I noticed that the material on it became so well-known that I couldn't really perform it anymore. And I didn't know how many things I was going to be able to think of. I knew if I made a second album, I'd have to make a third album's worth of stuff to take out live, so audiences wouldn't just hear the same things they'd already heard before. I didn't know at the time if I had that in me, but I just kept accumulating new material. If I had the business sense of a hubcap, I would have said, "I'm up to the third album worth of stuff, so let's record the second one now," but I forgot about it. I just kept piling more and more material up, and didn't think about albums anymore. See, the album helped me go from clubs into theaters, but I didn't think I needed to make another one, because I'm still in theaters.

"When I was a kid, my parents would always follow up bad words by saying 'Pardon my French.' Well, recently, I was walking down the street, and this old lady comes up to me and asks, 'Do you speak French?' 'Certainly,' I said. 'Can you say something in French for me?' 'Fuck you, you fucking asshole.' I caught the teeth as they went flying out of her mouth."

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