Steven Wright, master of meh: 'This is just how I talk. It accidentally went well with the jokes' | Stage

Steven Wright, master of meh: 'This is just how I talk. It accidentally went well with the jokes' | Stage

There are answers, and there are Steven Wright answers. Who else â€" responding to questions over the phone from London to Rhode Island, where he loves to vacation â€" would compare owning an Oscar statuette to “seeing Neil Armstrong bouncing down your driveway as if he was walking on the moon”? Who else, reflecting on 38 years as one of America’s best-loved standups, would describe themselves as “a car that has no gears”. Wright elaborates: “I just started at an open mic night in the 1970s and I’m still going, still doing now what I started to do then. I know other people might look up to me. But really, I’m just me after a bit of time has gone by.”

That’s true, to a large extent: Wright’s comic style has remained remarkably consistent over four decades. But the 62-year-old isn’t being “just me” right now. He’s being an emoji, in an animated movie to be released this summer. That’s where the transformation ends, however, given that the deadpan-bordering-on-catatonic Wright has been cast as Meh, the only emoji characterised by a complete lack of emotion.

“That’s great if I’m the guy they want to have no expression,” says Wright, with all the expressiveness he can muster. “And later, my voice is going to be coming out of this round, yellow thing, which is bizarre. In Babe: Pig in the City, my voice came out of a real chimpanzee. It’s weird to go to the movies and see a 15ft chimpanzee’s head with your voice coming out of it. It’s fun.”

Wright won an Oscar for best live action short film in 1988 (with The Appointments of Dennis Jennings, co-starring Rowan Atkinson). He’s also twice Grammy nominated for his comedy albums, I Have a Pony (1985) and I Still Have a Pony (2007), Emmy-nominated for co-producing Louis CK’s sitcom Louie and was recently ranked #15 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 50 best standup comics of all time. (He was sandwiched between Andy Kaufman and Billy Connolly, which must be a fun place to spend time.)

“I’ve been so lucky,” he tells me, repeatedly. A disciple of Woody Allen and George Carlin (and, he says for my benefit, Monty Python), he emerged â€" big-haired and sleepy-eyed â€" from the Boston circuit, becoming an overnight star in 1982 after a maiden appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. “No single career,” as the New York Times had it, “better demonstrates Carson’s now fabled star-making powers”. From the get-go, Wright’s shtick was surreal, philosophical one-liners â€" twisty of logic, light on context and lethargically delivered. “You never know what you have until it’s gone,” runs one, “and I wanted to know what I had, so I got rid of everything.” Or: “I went to the hardware store, bought some used paint. It was in the shape of a house.”

I’d have guessed that Wright was a linguistic master craftsman, burning the midnight oil as he burnishes these comic haikus to full brilliance. But that’s not the case, he says. “The idea comes, then the wording comes within 25 seconds. And then it’s done. And if I say it and it doesn’t work, I don’t change it, I get rid of it.” His shtick likewise arrived fully-formed. “I didn’t think about a style. I didn’t think about anything other than ‘maybe they’ll laugh at this?’ The fact that it was monotone, and abstract â€" the whole thing that I’m known for â€" just fell together. I’m so happy because I didn’t have another way of doing it.” And the voice, he says, is no stage affectation. “This is just how I talk. It accidentally meshed well with the jokes I do, and it’s another fluke.”

In the early days, stage fright intensified his monotone; nowadays, concentration has a similar effect. “Standing on the stage is different to everywhere else,” says Wright. “It’s so intense; such an exciting, dangerous thing. You’re standing there, your mind is going a million miles an hour, you’re so aware of everything: things that work and don’t work, how you said the joke, how you moved, and you’re remembering all your lines.”

And yet, if he had to choose between “[the] two different jobs, the writing and then the performing of what I’ve written”, as Wright puts it, he’d give up performing first. “Because writing is thinking, and I love to think,” he says. “I’m on the stage for one hour, and I love it. But I don’t have to go to a theatre to think: I can think all the time.” Even from three thousand miles away, the glow of Wright’s job satisfaction is dazzling: we’re a long way from “meh”. “I’m so fortunate,” he concludes, “because I just love making shit up.”

• The Emoji Movie is out on 4 August

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