Comedian Steven Wright has a delivery that's so deadpan he looks ready for an autopsy. But don't let that fool you. His brain is alive and well and working overtime, making acrobatic leaps of logic while his face hardly moves a muscle.
Who else would think of things like:"I bought a cordless extension cord."
Or, "I was wearing my eyeglasses yesterday and all of a sudden the prescription ran out."
Or, "She was a stewardess for Federal Express."
Or, "I saw a sign that said 24-hour banking. I don't have time for that."
These are one-liners all right, but not in the conventional sense. They come from so far out of the blue, with so little warning, that you can hardly call them punch lines.
Delivered in Wright's mumbling monotone, they seem less like a punch a more like a tap on the shoulder - a nudge that says, hey, did you ever look at life this way before?
Saturday night's appreciative, sellout Homecoming crowd at Kingsbury Hall proved that a comedian can rely on his cerebrum instead of on four-letter words - and still be popular.
Most of Saturday night's young audience probably knows Wright from his many appearances on The Tonight Show, David Letterman, Saturday Night Live and several HBO specials. He has also appeared in two movies - "Desperately Seeking Susan" and "Stars and Bars."
This was Wright's second appearance in Salt Lake. Unlike some stand-up comics, the Boston-born comedian brought nearly all new material this time around, including many imponderables such as:
"What's the youngest you can die of old age?"
And "If you shoot a mime should you use a silencer?"
And "What's another word for thesaurus?"
Life, it seems, is full of questions never considered before. And possibilities most of us never dreamed of:
Last week, for example, Wright gave his brother a gift. It was a roll of wrapping paper. When he had the wrapping paper gift wrapped he asked the clerk to use wrapping paper with a different print - "so when he opens it he'll know when to stop."
And life is full of the kind of impreciseness that Steven Wright finds so baffling.
He went into a store the other day, for example, and there was a sign that said "Free with any purchase." So of course what he wanted to know was: "Did anyone buy anything today?"
You don't go to a Steven Wright performance and expect to come back with jokes you can repeat. Most of them sound a little lame standing alone, without the context of Wright's brain and Wright's delivery. Some of the jokes aren't even that funny when you're there ("I remember the day the candle shop burned down. Everybody just stood around and sang Happy Birthday.")
You go to a Steven Wright performance to have your mind awakened by a man who looks like he might nearly be asleep.
"Is it weird in here or is it just me?" Wright asked his audience Saturday night.
After 60 minutes of non-stop non-sequiturs, you have to agree it's definitely weird in here.