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The guy on the couch >> Getting into comedian Steven Wright's head by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
I've got actual audio documentation of a hearty, robust laugh from no less than Mr. Excitement himself, comedian Steven Wright. The guffaw came forth when I referred to his performance as the Guy on the Couch, in the recent stoner epic Half Baked, as a "searing tour-de-force." "Did you see that on tape?" he asks me. "It's weird, because that movie kind of came and went in the theatres, and then 10 months later, all of a sudden, all these people... first it started out slowly. I was at a gas station and the guy goes, 'Hey, aren't you the guy on the couch?' I didn't even know what the guy was talking about. Like, what? It's always 18- to 23-year-old people." In other words, the High Times subscription list. Considering Wright's off-kilter sense of humour, surreality bites enunciated in a flat monotone, you'd think the man was a baker himself. "I was, as a younger man. I don't discourage people from it. But I haven't smoked in about 20 years." Turtle waxing Just as well. Wright needs to keep his short-term memory intact, seeing as how he doesn't carry a notebook or dictaphone to capture those whimsical little notions that fuel his schtick. "It usually happens when I'm out and about. If I don't have a pen, I just remember them and write them down when I get home. That's the pride of my life, that I don't forget them." Hence, you'll hear him bust nuggets about cranking blank tapes to annoy his mime neighbours. Or spilling spot remover on his dog, who promptly disappeared. Or buying instant water, and not having anything to mix it with. There's a brilliant logic to Wright's observations, compounded by his deadpan delivery, almost robotic and barely above a mumble. That delivery, so uniquely his own in standup comedy's jungle of coked-out, hyperactive loudmouths, has earned him some unusual gigs... like voicing Speed the Turtle in the animated film The Swan Princess. "It's very weird to go into a movie theatre and see this big drawing of a turtle with your own voice coming out of it... (pause) and you're not on acid. It was really happening. It was just fun. To me, anything where I'm not writing is basically just pure fun. Because thoughts are the hardest... thinking up the ideas. I like thinking up the ideas, I enjoy that, too. But when you write for yourself, and then you get to do something where you're not writing, it's almost like having a day off." Shrink factor One subject that recurs in Wright's work is psychiatry. When the gas station flunky asked if he was "the guy on the couch," little did he know about Wright's love/hate relationship with shrinks. He's played shrinks (in Natural Born Killers), guys in need of a shrink (in Mixed Nuts), and in his own short film, a guy who kills his damn shrink. That film was the decade-old, Oscar-winning Appointments of Dennis Jennings, which Wright co-wrote and starred in. The unlucky doctor, by the way, was played by the future Mr. Bean, Rowan Atkinson. That was Wright's first crack at short filmmaking. Now, 10 years later, he's giving it another shot with the half-hour One Soldier, which is just starting to make the festival circuit. "It's about a guy, just after the Civil War. He's just talking, expressing how he doesn't know why we're alive, and is there a God, and thinking about death and questions that can't be answered. And then he's executed. And right before he dies, he realizes that he's wasted his whole life on these questions. The girl he's with is more living in the moment. It's not that that she's stupid, she's smarter in the sense that she knows that there's no answers, so there's no sense in wasting time. "But it's a comedy, though. It sounds so serious, what I just said, but it's all mixed together with some really silly stuff." In other words, Wright's worldview in a nutshell. Oh, I'm sorry... did I say "nut"? At Théâtre Olympia, Monday, March 15, 8pm, $38+taxes
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You can keep your rubies and diamonds, your Fabergé eggs and photos of Sasquatch. Because I've got something a good deal more precious and rare, right here in my sweaty hands.