The Big Bumper Thread of Stand-up Comedy

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J and I saw Steven Wright on Friday night. He was pretty amazing because the conditions were:

1) 1200 seat theatre really poorly laid out for standup comedy.

2) Sound system slightly under-volume for standup comedy.

3) Redneck casino crowd likely to include people who were just there because it was Friday night and a name they generally recognized.

but what happened was

1) No opener, no middle, no emcee: just the lights go down, and Steven Wright walks on stage

2) And he does 90 straight minutes of Steven Wright. There are no breaks. He does not give the audience 15 seconds of pause. One Steven Wright joke after another. Bam Bam Bam. It's remarkable.

I saw a small bottle of cologne and asked if it was for sale. She said, "It's free with purchase." I asked her if anyone bought anything today.

I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights, so it looks like I'm the only one moving.

Maybe 20% of it was older stuff that I recognized - I think I'm pretty familiar with the S.W. canon, but it didn't matter, because the whole thing was so DENSE with jokes. Mr. Wright is a genius and he merely comes on stage, pushes the pedal down, goes at his top speed and never lets up until the time is done. He is the Ramones of comedy, if the Ramones were actually clever in any way other than their presentation.

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I recently saw him do eight minutes on Carson from the early eighties. Wonderful.

My favorite Wrightism:

paraphrasing

I was on the cross town bus and I saw a six foot tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Chinese girl and she was crying. I asked her what was wrong. She said I can't tell my personal problems to a perfect stranger on the cross town bus. And I said that sometimes it might help to tell your personal problems to a perfect stranger on the cross town bus. And then she "I'm a six foot tall, blonde-haired blue-eyed Chinese girl who only gets turned on by Jewish cowboys."

I said "Hi, I'm Bucky Goldstein."

Maybe the longest, too.

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Just watched this on Netflix. Nine out of ten.

DAVE CHAPPELLE IS A FUCKING GOD.