Even people who don't like comedy like Steven Wright. US comic Woody Allen's favourite act, by all accounts, is the master of the laconic one-liner. Such deadpan delights made him one of the top box-office touring stars in the 1980s, but in this decade he's probably best known as being the most quoted comic on the Internet.
Hundreds of pages are devoted to collections of his best lines, which is somewhat missing the point that the jokes are best heard when delivered by Wright's trademark nasal Boston accent.
Due over for his first ever gigs in Ireland for the Murphy's Ungagged Comedy Festival next month, he professes himself to be "terribly excited" about the prospect. "I don't know why I'm so excited," he says in a voice that sounds anything but. "Maybe it's because I'm half-Scottish," he adds cryptically.
"I've been waiting to come over for years and years," he says. "I've heard of that Cat Laughs festival and I always wanted to do that but for some reason haven't yet. The problem with me is that when I tour, I need to take loads of time off afterwards, just to hang around and read a few books and stuff, just so I have enough time to put some new material together."
Not that he needs any new material; audiences worldwide are just as happy for him to go through his greatest hits - possessing as he does some of the best one-liners in the business. From Burlington, Massachusetts, he started doing stand-up in the late 1970s in a Chinese restaurant, but it was legendary talk show host Johnny Carson who propelled him into the big time - Carson was such a fan he had Wright on his show almost every other night.
After Carson, he was more or less the in-house comic on The David Letterman Show, and he simultaneously developed a huge cult following on this side of the water, thanks to comedy albums such as I Have A Pony (a classic work) and various HBO television specials. He was also, memorably, the voice of the radio DJ in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.
Much of Wright's appeal lies in his stubborn opposition to what passes for a lifestyle these days. In quick-edit, fast-forward, call-waiting-times, he remains a contemporary refusnik. "I think a lot of my material reflects that opposition," he says. "I don't know, these days it's just like everyone is caught up in a raging river, in rapids - with all these faxes and everything. I try to get out of the river sometimes. Try to grab onto a branch on the shore . . .
"I suppose I really should have born in the 1800s, in somewhere like Vermont. And in a way, that's just what I do: I offer the perspective of someone born in the last century on the madness that now surrounds us. I mean, I don't even have a computer, or a mobile phone. I write all my material down on paper, and I don't even have lines on the paper." Speaking of computers, Wright is quick to distance himself from the huge interest in his work on the Internet. "The Internet is like some electronic island with all these people going crazy having this experience. About five years ago, a friend of mine typed my name into a search engine and there were all these pages with my jokes on them.
"Three years ago, he did the same thing and only about half of the jokes attributed to me were by me, and the last time he did none of the jokes under my name were written by me. There was one `joke' on one of the pages: `If Barbie is so popular, why do you have to buy her friends?' I mean I just cringe when I read stuff like that. It just seems like people are trying to write jokes in my style, which is sort of crazy. Maybe I should just franchise myself out, have loads of little McWrights out there - over a billion jokes told!"
He's not just a one-liner jukebox comic though; his forays into more narrative-style material have yielded some surprising results. "I do this story about a coach-load of members of the Vienna Boys Choir who get stuck on a railway crossing. I suppose that's more in keeping with today's new style of comedy, where it's not so much the jokes, but the concepts."
Having made one very well-received comedy film, The Appointments of Dennis Jennings, (with Rowan Atkinson), he's just completed another one, which premiered in the US earlier this year and should be seen by audiences over here within the next few months. "The new one is called One Sol- dier," he says. "It's about a guy right after the Civil War, who's obsessed with all these unanswerable questions. And then he gets executed . . . it's a comedy".
Steven Wright plays the Temple Bar Music Centre on November 12th and 13th
