Growing Up Laughing_ My Story and the Story of Funny - Marlo Thomas [84]
Marlo: Well, that’s sort of what a biography is, you know? There are a lot of them on Winston Churchill, like twenty-seven volumes. He must have been a very self-centered man.
Steven: Yeah. That’s hilarious.
“I remember when the candle shop burned down.
Everyone stood around singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ ”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: You can say in one sentence what it takes most comics to say in a paragraph. Your one-liners are like gold. How many rough drafts do you go through to get it so perfect?
Steven: Something in my mind starts to edit down the joke so I can get the point across with the fewest amount of words. I don’t like standing there if they’re not laughing. I don’t like doing big, long set-ups.
Marlo: It’s so economical, what you do. You take us from the beginning to the end in such a short amount of time. And you embrace the absurdity of life. If the world were more normal, would you be out of work?
Steven: Probably. There are so many weird things in life—from the time you wake up till the moment you go to sleep. So many pieces of information go by, and some of it just jumps out at me as a joke.
Marlo: How many of these lines do you do in a typical show—like eighty?
Steven: A typical ninety-minute show has a couple hundred lines, probably.
Marlo: Wow.
Steven: To do a five-minute thing on The Tonight Show, that would be about twenty, twenty-two jokes.
“I had a friend who was a clown.
When he died, all his friends went to the funeral in one car.”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: What’s the longest Steven Wright joke on record?
Steven: It was a pretty traditional story.
Marlo: Tell it to me.
Steven: I was on a bus and I started talking to this blond Chinese girl and she said, “Hello,” and I said, “Hello, isn’t it an amazing day?” And she said, “Yes, I guess.” And I said, “What do you mean, ‘I guess’?” And she said, “Well, things haven’t been going too well for me lately.” I said, “Why?” She said, “I can’t tell you. I don’t even know you.” And I said, “Yeah, but sometimes it’s good to tell your problems to a total stranger on a bus.” And she said, “Well, I’ve just come back from my analyst and he’s still unable to help me.” And I said, “What’s the problem?” And she said, “I’m a nymphomaniac, and I only get turned on by Jewish cowboys.” Then she said, “By the way, my name is Diane.” And I said, “Hello, Diane, I’m Bucky Goldstein.”
That’s, by far, the longest joke I’ve ever done. It was worth it because the laugh was huge. I did it so many times, I kind of retired it.
“It was the first time I was in love and I learned a lot.
Before that I never even thought about killing myself.”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: People always call you deadpan. How did that start?
Steven: It was an accident. I was so afraid of being on stage that I’d talk very seriously, even though I was saying these insane things. I was concentrating so hard on trying to say them in the correct way, and in the correct order, that it came out deadpan. And that became my trademark.
Marlo: You don’t ever appear nervous. I mean, when I’m nervous, I talk as fast as possible. How did you keep that kind of unflappable calm?
Steven: A friend of mine gave me some good advice when I would do The Tonight Show. I would be so nervous that I’d almost get, like, numb. So my friend told me to play the studio audience like I was playing in a little club. There were 500 people in the studio, so I just ignored the idea that it was going out on TV. And once they started laughing, it became just like in the clubs. If you stop to think that 10 million people are watching you, you’d get so nervous you couldn’t even function.
“I was reading the dictionary.
I thought it was a poem about everything.”
—Steven Wright
Marlo: How did it all start for you?
Steven: From TV. I have two brothers and one sister. My brother controlled the television because he was older, so I had to watch what he watched. And I liked it—Johnny Carson’s monologue, and all the comedians he had on, like Robert Klein, David Brenner and George Carlin.
Also, there was a radio show in Boston every Sunday