Steven Wright, master of the one-liner, tries fiction
If there’s one living stand- up legend whose jokes are perfect for Twitter, it’s Steven Wright. Not only are they concise (“Lost a buttonhole”) but so meticulously absurd (“I like to reminisce with people I don’t know”) that rapid shifts of context don’t distort their meaning.
So it was a surprise that when he started an account in 2011, he didn’t use it to try out punch lines, but to write a novel — very slowly. It almost sounds like a Steven Wright joke. But more than a decade later, this larky experiment has turned into a book, “Harold,” about a meandering, bizarrely charming day in the life of a 7-year- old boy.
In an almost stream- ofconsciousness style from the boy’s point of view, “Harold,” which takes place in the 1960s when Wright was a kid, pingpongs from musings on a third-grade teacher to a daydream about going to the moon. Plenty of its sentences would not be out of place in Wright’s standup: “All art is modern art at some point.”
Sitting in the New York City office of Simon & Schuster last month, Wright, who has been telling jokes in front of audiences for more than 40 years, explained in his signature gravelly drone that stand-up provided him a very “narrow window of creativity.” Not a criticism, he’s quick to add, just a description of the appeal of the new, more expansive form. “I wanted to put a funnel on Harold’s head and pour everything I think about being alive” into it, he said. “Lawyers, religion, space. Everything.”
Asked why he would focus on a boy, Wright shrugged. But he believes children notice things that adults miss. He sounds almost jealous when he describes the uncluttered mind of a young person. A kid, he said, is like “an alien who just got off a spaceship and is looking around.”
Wright can resemble an alien himself. He seems as laconic and lyrical as he is onstage, except warmer and quicker to laugh. Metaphors pour from him like a Bob Dylan song come to life. When asked to describe Wright, Marc Maron texted me: “Poet. Happens. Rarely. In. Comedy.”
There’s no more storied example of Johnny Carson making an overnight star than when his booker, visiting colleges for his son, stumbled upon an unknown Wright performing in a Chinese restaurant in Boston. Wright killed on “The Tonight Show” in 1982, when the studio audience alone was his biggest crowd yet. Three years later, Wright released “I Have a Pony,” a classic of modern stand-up.
If you came to it young, as many did and still do, it could rejigger your entire sense of humor. Comic Anthony Jeselnik said Wright “inf luenced everything about my comedy.” Bobcat Goldthwait called him “human pot,” explaining, “Listen to him long enough, and you feel stoned and see the world as absurd and amused as he does.”
Wright described his background as resolutely ordinary: middle- class, allAmerican, Norman Rockwell stuff. Sensitive, a little quiet, he didn’t tell his family that he had been doing comedy for years. Wright calls his break “a fluke.”
Don’t be fooled by this fairy-tale story. Wright not only had a gift for old-fashioned joke construction but also a rare discipline and taste that he remained stubbornly faithful to. Take one example: “I’ve always hated puns,” he said with a rare flash of passion that he chuckled at. “It would be funnier if you dropped a dish.”
Early on, he set up rules for his comedy that might have hurt him in the short term but have allowed his work to age as well as any comedian’s. He avoided anything topical. He also did not curse. “I didn’t want to get a bigger laugh because of that,” he said. “I wanted it to be pure.”
Wright’s monotone oneliners remain a touchstone for a comedy subgenre, along with the other master of deadpan, Mitch Hedberg, who died in 2005.
“The biggest difference between Mitch and Steven is that when you saw an hour of Mitch, you got an idea of who he voted for, what he was about,” said Goldthwait, who, like Wright, emerged from the Boston comedy scene of the 1980s. “You watch Steven for an hour and have more questions about him than before you saw him.”
This is why “Harold” holds a particular fascination for comedy fans. What more can we learn about the elusive Wright?
There’s a romantic streak mostly absent from his comedy. The Apollo mission to the moon looms large in the story, and Wright’s father, an engineer, worked for a company that helped build parts for NASA. Seeing a camera wrapped in plastic that was heading for space at his dad’s workplace fired his imagination and was at one point a scene in the book. That was cut, but the thrill of space travel remains.
There is also more talk of love — sometimes lustful, other times weary. “Being in love was like being on a seesaw where one side contained nitroglycerin,” he writes. “When you first get on no one knows which side has it.”
The most revealing thing “Harold” captures about Wright is the way he thinks about thinking.
Described by the author as “a wondering machine,” the boy ponders whether it’s “possible to be in your 70s and have the perspective of a 5-year- old without being nuts?” Wright is 67 and said he performs less these days.
The book’s central metaphor is a description of Harold’s thought process as a room with one window and a riot of birds flying around. Occasionally one flies out. That represents an idea. It’s a view of creativity that is random and unpredictable. Isn’t it a bit scary? What happens if the birds stop flying out?
Wright released relatively few specials in his career because, he said, “I can only think of so much stuff.” But he looked at ease with the idea that some things are out of our control. “You can try to think of ideas, but your mind is running on its own. Or at least my mind,” he said. “It’s mostly chaos, but you’re organizing a lot of it.”
Then he paused to smile and toss out one last metaphor: “You have to stay on the road when you drive.”