Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the host of the Laugh Track column, a man who hasn’t yet tasted it all … Mike McIntyre.
Thank you, Cleveland!
Did you see that Taco Bell now has a taco shell made of fried chicken? It’s called the Naked Chicken Chalupa. The name offers excellent advice: If you are naked while you eat it, paramedics won’t have to cut your clothes off before applying the defibrillator paddles.
He’s always Wright: Steven Wright is just “a totally regular guy with an extra imagination, but I’m basically real.”
So it kind of freaks him out that so many people know at least one Steven Wright joke, whether they’ve heard him tell it or seen it passed along on social media, with or without attribution. So universally is Wright’s craftsmanship quoted that sometimes the jokes aren’t even his. In fact, that’s a growing trend and a side effect of social media.
“Fifteen years ago, me and my friend sat at a computer and they were all my jokes, and three years later, half were my jokes, and then later three-quarters were not my jokes,” he said when we chatted last week.
“It’s very bizarre. It’s like a crime. It’s fascinating — the technology is the Wild West, there’s no rules. It’s almost like if a guy broke into a Barnes and Noble at night and found ‘Oliver Twist’ and ripped out Chapter 15 of the book and put his own in there, and all of a sudden, Oliver moves to Miami and is running a rowboat company and invented a new kind of paint. And someone reads this and says, ‘Charles Dickens is nuts!’ “
Sometimes the jokes attributed to him are not just nuts; they’re not funny. Sometimes, he thinks, the jokes he actually wrote are awful, too. And sometimes the jokes he gets credit for, but did not write, are really good.
“It has happened so many times, I have no reaction, or I just say, ‘Thank you,’ ” he said. “There’s some amazing jokes attributed to me, like, ‘I’d kill for the Nobel Peace Prize.’ I didn’t write that. I wish I had.”
Lately, Wright has been jazzed by the chance to work with comedic genius Louis C.K.
Wright has a role in C.K.’s 10-episode Internet comedy series “Horace & Pete” (second season coming), which also stars Steve Buscemi, Jessica Lange, Edie Falco and Alan Alda. Not a shabby cast. But he’s most charged up by an offer C.K. made to him “out of the blue” to consult on his self-referential FX series, “Louie.”
“For me, the stand-up is you do it all alone. I decide everything. I write, I edit, I do everything. And Louie, who is like the Woody Allen of our time and Richard Pryor, does the show, and he lets me sit in with him, like a band. He lets me sit in with his band,” Wright says.
When Wright comes to Cleveland, though, it’s the one-man band we’ve come to know over four deadpan decades that have been guided by four basic rules he developed before he told his first joke on “The Tonight Show” in 1982.
“One is not to talk about a big TV show or movie star or the president. I didn’t want to talk about anything attached to time. I talk about gravity and the speed of light. Things that will never go away,” he says.
“I wasn’t going to swear, although I have broken that rule a handful of times. I wasn’t going to talk about sex, do sex jokes. And I wasn’t going to do jokes at anyone’s expense,” he says.
“The swearing thing, it’s just how I was brought up. Like a Norman Rockwell kid, if acid was involved later on. I found out that swearing made the joke go better. If I said, ‘The horse fell down’ and if you said, ‘The f-ing horse fell down,’ you get a better laugh. To me, that was like cheating. For me. Not when I am listening to other comedians,” he said.
“And when I started, HBO was just starting, and my goal was to go on Tipobet TV on ‘The Tonight Show,’ and I didn’t want to build up material I couldn’t do.”
That first “Tonight Show” set launched his career. Johnny Carson, who made comedy careers by inviting stand-ups to sit down and chat after their set, invited Wright and called his material “wonderfully inventive stuff.”
“Did they just let you out for this evening?” he asked. “Yeah,” Wright shot back without missing a beat. “I have an hour left.”
The set was filled with enduring jokes, but he remembers one of them most because he hadn’t planned on using it.
” ‘It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.’ Remember that joke? I just slid it in, and it became one of my most quoted ones,” he said.
And, yes, that one is all him.
Wright performs at the Ohio Theatre at 8 p.m Friday. Tickets are $45-$65. Call 216-241-6000 or go to playhousesquare.org.
Jim Jefferies: And now for something completely different. At the same time Wright performs at the Ohio, hard-edged Australian comic Jim Jefferies brings his “Unusual Punishment Tour” to the Connor Palace at Playhouse Square. Tickets for the 8 p.m. Friday show are $39.50-$49.50 at playhousesquare.org or by calling 216-241-6000.
At the clubs:
Michael Kosta, host of “The Comment Section” on the E1 network, headlines Hilarities at 8 p.m. Thursday ($23), 7:30 and 10 p.m. Friday, and 7 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday ($28) at the club inside Pickwick & Frolic restaurant, 2035 East Fourth St., Cleveland. Call 216-736-4242. The Cleveland-based opening acts are great, too, with host John Bruton and feature performer Ryan Dalton.
At the Improv, crowd favorite Sheryl Underwood headlines at 7:30 and 10 p.m. Friday, and 7 and 9:30 p.m. Saturday. (Tickets are $30.) The Improv is at 1148 Main Ave., next to Shooters on the west bank of Cleveland’s Flats. Call 216-696-4677.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
