Wright began performing stand-up comedy in 1979 at the Comedy Connection in Boston. Wright cites stand-up comic
George Carlin and director and former stand-up comic
Woody Allen as comedic influences. In 1982,
Peter Lassally, executive producer of
NBC's
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, saw Wright performing on a bill with other local comics at the Ding Ho comedy club in Cambridge, a venue Wright described as "half Chinese restaurant and half comedy club. It was a pretty weird place." By then Wright had developed a new brand of extreme
deadpan, and was building a cultlike following. His onstage persona was characterized by an aura of obscurity and his penchant for non sequiturs added to his mystique. The performance became one of HBO's longest-running and most requested comedy specials and propelled him to great success on the college-arena concert circuit.
Continued success beyond stand-up In 1989, Wright 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 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 said, "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 these were largely absent from television, and he only occasionally made 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. 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. Beginning in 2008, Wright occasionally appeared on
The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson as a visiting celebrity, often dropping by to help with the fan-mail segment. He joined a small cadre of Hollywood comedy celebrities who supported the show. == Awards and honors ==