I just started at an open mic night in the 1970s and I’m still going, still doing now what I started to do then. I know other people might look up to me. But really, I’m just me after a bit of time has gone by.
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Steven Wright
Steven Alexander Wright (born December 6, 1955) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and an Oscar-winning film producer. He is known for his distinctly lethargic voice and slow, deadpan delivery of ironic, philosophical, and sometimes nonsense jokes, paraprosdokians, non sequiturs, anti-humor, and one-liners with contrived situations. Wright was ranked as the twenty-third greatest comedian by Comedy Central in a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics. He was awarded the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film for his 1988 short film The Appointments of Dennis Jennings. 2Early life and career Wright was born at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and grew up in Burlington, Massachusetts, one of four children of Lucille "Dolly" (née Lomano) and Alexander K. Wright. He was raised as a Roman Catholic. His mother was Italian American and his father was of Scottish descent. Wright's father worked as an electronics technician who "tested a lot of stuff" for NASA (in the Apollo spacecraft program), and when that program ended he worked as a truck driver. Wright attended Middlesex Community College in Bedford, Massachusetts for two years to earn his associate's degree before continuing his baccalaureate education at Emerson College. He graduated from Emerson in 1978 and the next year he began performing stand-up comedy in 1979 at the Comedy Connection in Bosto
The dreams of my life were to go on The Tonight Show and to have a small part in a movie. When I was 28, I had been on The Tonight Show a bunch of times, and Risa Bramon, who was casting Desperately Seeking Susan—I didn't know her, but she liked my stand-up—brought me to the attention of the…
You're on a jet, you're five miles in the air, you're going 500 miles an hour, and you ask someone to bring you another Coke. That is as weird to me as any joke I said last night. I think that's why people identify with me, because there are a billion pieces of information, and there's so much…
Very rarely do I talk off the top of my head on stage. I'm not an improv guy. I'm a writer-guy who presents what he's written. I don't even really write the jokes, they just come into my head, and a joke can't come into my head on stage, because I'm too busy.
Over the years, I've learned that the best way to react [to hecklers] is to ignore them. I don't need to be in a two-man band with a stranger when I'm doing what I do.