Steven Wright Biography

Steven Alexander Wright (born December 6, 1955) is an American 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 nonsensical 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.

Early 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" (ne 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 Boston. Wright cites comic George Carlin and director Woody Allen as comedic influences.

In 1982 executive producer of The Tonight Show Peter Lassally saw Wright performing on a bill with other local comics at the Ding Ho comedy club, in Cambridge's Inman Square, a venue Wright described as "half Chinese restaurant and half comedy club. It was a pretty weird place." Lassally booked Wright on NBC's The Tonight Show, where the comic so impressed host Johnny Carson and the studio audience that less than a week later Wright was invited to appear on the show again. In May 2000, Wright and other Ding Ho alumni including Lenny Clarke, Barry Crimmins, Steve Sweeney, Bill Sohonage, and Jimmy Tingle appeared at a reunion benefit for comic Bob Lazarus who was suffering from leukemia.

Stand-up success

Wright's 1985 comedy album was entitled I Have a Pony. It was released on Warner Bros. Records, received critical acclaim and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album. The success of this album landed him an HBO special which he recorded as a live college concert performance, A Steven Wright Special. By then Wright had firmly developed a new brand of obscure, laid-back performing and was rapidly building a cult-like following of hip, savvy fans and an onstage persona characterized by an aura of obscurity, with his penchant for non-sequiturs and subdued, slowly-paced delivery style only adding to his mystique. His opening act for the HBO concert was fellow "Ding Ho" comedy alumnus Bill Sohonage, who claimed that Steven's ultra-casual, nearly catatonic demeanor was no act. "He walked into my dressing room, minutes before I was to take the stage, and asked if he could borrow a shirt, as his had a giant pizza stain. You would think it might be normal to be a little nervous going on a college stage in front of 23,000, let alone having HBO out there filming, but as I passed by his room while walking on-stage I saw him sound asleep and loudly snoring." The performance would become one of HBO's longest running and most requested comedy specials, and would propel him to great success on the college-arena concert circuit.

In 1989 he and fellow producer Dean Parisot won an Academy Award for their 30-minute short film "The Appointments of Dennis Jennings," directed by Parisot, written by Mike Armstrong and Wright, and starring Wright and Rowan Atkinson. Upon accepting the Oscar, Wright said, "We're really glad that we cut out the other sixty minutes." In 1992 Wright had a recurring role on the television sitcom Mad About You. He also supplied the voice of the radio DJ in writer-director Quentin Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs that same year. "Dean Parisot's wife Sally Menke is Quentin Tarantino's [film] editor, so when she was editing the movie and it was getting down toward the end where they didn't have the radio DJ yet, she thought of me and told Quentin and he liked the idea," Wright explained in 2009.

Numerous lists of jokes attributed to Wright circulate on the Internet, sometimes of dubious origin. Wright has stated, "Someone showed me a site, and half of it that said I wrote it, I didn't write. Recently, I saw one, and I didn't write any of it. What's disturbing is that with a few of these jokes, I wish I had thought of them. A giant amount of them, I'm embarrassed that people think I thought of them, because some are really bad."

After his 1990 comedy special Wicker Chairs and Gravity, Wright continued to do stand-up performances, but he was largely absent from television, doing only occasional guest spots on late-night talk shows. In 1999 he wrote and directed the 30-minute short One Soldier saying it's "about a soldier who was in the Civil War, right after the war, with all these existentialist thoughts and wondering if there is a God and all that stuff."

In 2006 Wright produced his first stand-up special in 16 years, Steven Wright: When the Leaves Blow Away, originally aired on Comedy Central on October 21, 2006. Its DVD was released April 23, 2007. On September 25, 2007 Wright released his second album, I Still Have a Pony, a CD release of the material from When The Leaves Blow Away. It was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album, but The Distant Future by Flight of the Conchords won that award.

Awards and honors

Steven Wright was awarded an Oscar in 1989 for Best Short Live-Action Film for The Appointments of Dennis Jennings, which he co-wrote (with Michael Armstrong) and starred in. He received two Emmy nominations as part of the producing team of Louie, first in 2014 and again in 2015.

On December 15, 2008, Wright became the first inductee to the Boston Comedy Hall of Fame.

In a 2005 poll to find The Comedian's Comedian, he was voted amongst the top 50 comedy acts by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. He was named No. 23 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics.

Other interests

While not well known for works outside of the comedy realm, Steven Wright is also a musician and has also recorded several non-comedy songs with his friend and occasional actor Mark Wuerthner. Wright also has an interest in painting.

Beginning in 2008, Steven Wright occasionally appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson as a visiting celebrity, dropping by the show to help with the fan-mail segment. He joined a small cadre of Hollywood comedy celebrities who supported the show.

Filmography

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1979	WKRP in Cincinnati	Security Officer	Episode: "Fish Story"
	The Last Word	Man in Crowd
1985	Desperately Seeking Susan	Larry Stillman D.D.S.
	A Steven Wright Special	Himself	Stand-up special; also writer
1987	Trying Times	Dwight Harper	Episode: "Get a Job"
1988	The Appointments of Dennis Jennings	Dennis Jennings	Also writer and producer Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film
	Stars and Bars	Pruitt
1990	Men of Respect	Sterling
1991	Wicker Chairs and Gravity	Himself	HBO stand-up special; also writer and producer
1992	Reservoir Dogs	K-Billy DJ	Voice
	Bob	Noah the Cab Driver	Episode: "Mad Dog on 34th Street"
1993	So I Married an Axe Murderer	Pilot
	Mad About You	Warren Mermelman	5 episodes
1994	The Swan Princess	Speed	Voice
	Natural Born Killers	Dr. Emil Reingold
	Speechless	Eddie
	Mixed Nuts	Man at Pay Phone
1995	For Better or Worse	Cabbie
	Canadian Bacon	Niagara Mountie
1995-97	Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist	Steven	Voice, 2 episodes
1997	Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child	Bogeyman	Voice, episode: "Mother Goose"
	Almost Perfect	Ray Whitestone	Episode: "Dating for Ratings"
1998	Half Baked	The Guy on the Couch	Uncredited
	The Simpsons	Himself	Voice, episode: "The Last Temptation of Krust"
	Babe: Pig in the City	Bob	Voice
1998-99	Hercules: The Legendary Journeys	Bootes	Voice, 2 episodes
1999	Becker	Boyd Crossman	Episode: "Larry Spoke"
	Space Ghost Coast to Coast	Himself	Voice, episode: "Snatch"
	One Soldier		Short; director, writer, producer
	The Muse	Stan Spielberg
2000	Loser	Panty Hose Customer
2001	The Downer Channel	Walter	Episode: "#1.2"
2003	Coffee and Cigarettes	Steven	Segment: "Strange to Meet You"
2005	Son of the Mask	Daniel Moss
	The Aristocrats	Himself
	When Stand Up Stood Out	Himself
2006	When the Leaves Blow Away	Himself	Comedy Central stand-up special; also writer and executive producer
2011	Aqua Teen Hunger Force	Danny	Episode: "Allen Part One"
2011-15	Louie	Comic Strip MC / Himself	Actor: 2 episodes, story by: "The Road: Part 2", producer: 8 episodes
2012	"(I'm From) Western Mass"	Dr. Westchesterson	Music video
2015	The Flaming C	R.A.N.D.Y.	Voice, 2 episodes
2016	Horace and Pete	Leon	Web series
2017	The Emoji Movie	Mel Meh Emoji	Voice

Discography

• I Have a Pony, Warner Bros. Records CD (1985)
• A Steven Wright Special, HBO DVD (1985)
• The Appointments of Dennis Jennings, DVD (1989)
• One Soldier, DVD (1999)
• When the Leaves Blow Away, DVD (2006)
• I Still Have a Pony, Comedy Central Records CD (2007)