I have this bitchen transcriber machine. It's got a foot pedal that makes me feel like a race car driver, only without the danger. Using the pedal, I can play, rewind and fastforward microcassette recordings, and on the main console, there are hand levers to adjust volume, speed and tone. If I slow the tape so my typing can fall in rhythm with the voice, I can also raise the tone so the speaker's voice won't sound garbled.
Steven Wright is the first interviewee whose voice I have not had to slow down to transcribe, bar none. But just for the hell of it, and because I have too much free time, I played around with speed/tone. Whereas at a high speed and high tone I sounded like Mickey Mouse with a crab pinching his privates, Steven Wright sounded like a wiseguy, maybe a Bowery Boy.
In other words, Wright sounds the same on stage, film and tape recordings as he does in real life: laconic, mellow, lackadaisical.
Seems Wright only appears to be taking his time. "I look like I'm casual and I'm moving slow and I'm talking slow," Wright says, "but my mind is racing."
But surely he is more low-key than the average American. Nope. Given the hypothetical situation of walking down the sidewalk and getting a foot caught in a mass of vines, as can happen in Florida, Wright confesses, "I would rip my foot out and (swear) at the thing."
Still, Wright is something of a show biz anomaly. For starters, he still refuses to own a cell phone or Palm Pilot.
"All I've had is like a phone and answering machine," he says, "until about two months ago. I got a laptop computer. But the reason I got it is this digital camera. It's amazing. I got it 'cause this computer had a program in it to edit video, and I wanted to be able to edit and shoot my own stuff. But it has all that, the e-mail and all that too. I never wanted any of that stuff.
"All this technology, it's kind of an illusion. It seems to make everything better. But what does "better' mean? It makes things more convenient, but it really causes more commotion. More people are calling you; you have to return more calls. It causes a frenzy."
Moving at a frenzied pace is not Wright's forte. Making jokes out of absurdities and twisting real life into surreal knots, however, is. No fewer than five of his witticisms made it into GQ's 1999 comedy issue, in which they actually attempted to rate the top 75 jokes of all time. Among Wright's honored were, "If I ever had twins, I'd use one for parts" (No. 5) and "When I was a little kid, we had a quicksand box. I was an only child … eventually" (No. 42).
It helps to "hear" the latter the way Wright would say it, in a sleepy drawl, "eventually" coming in only after the joke seems over.
Defying comic convention, Wright refuses to swear, if not at vines, at least on stage. He's been quoted saying he wants the laughs to come from the purity of the joke, the joke's inherent quality — not cheap laughs cued by a well-placed cuss word.
Wright says he feeds off an audience's energy. "They're like — each audience has its own personality, and you're definitely working off … what they're like. Reacting, very much. It's like surfing. Even though I've never surfed."
He's going purely for laughs at this stage, and he's getting them. Yet instead of rushing to keep his one-man audience snickering, Wright's a pro. He milks it, drawing the listener in.
"It's exactly like it. You have to adjust to how the waters move."
He sounds like a surfer.
"Well, I've seen it," Wright admits. "I consider myself an expert with very low standards."
His Oct. 18 performance at Ruth Eckerd Hall will be the first since Sept. 11 for this comic, who's more likely to talk about lint than current events.
"This is new to everyone," he says. "If the audience is there, they've obviously decided they want to see the show. I'm just gonna do the best I can. Just do it, see what happens."
O WRIGHT: Steven Wright is a comedian famous for combining the warped and the mundane.
This article appears in Oct 11-17, 2001.