Melbourne Concert
Hall from April 8, 1997
Reviewed by Kate
Herbert on April 8, 1997
Published in The
Melbourne Times in April 1997 (editor, Robin Usher)
Edward de Bono may
write books about lateral thinking but Steven Wright lives them. In fact, he
lives it on a planet far from ours. He inhabits the Planet Tangent that is
populated by missing verbal links, living dreams, lost thoughts and ideas which
turn your brain inside out.
"Don't think about it too much, " he quips after a
particularly obtuse reference. "Even I don't know what I'm talking
about." His one-liners are mind-bendingly funny. They come thick and fast
with no let-up.
Even the pauses are hilarious. His timing is impeccable.
Wright instinctively knows the answer to what might be one of his own
rhetorical questions. "How long is the perfect comedy pause?"
He is "a peripheral visionary", a comic conceptual
artist who despises "primitive linear thinking." His show is like an
hour and a half of those mind-teasers on the funny pages - only better - and
weirder.
Much of the material was in his 1996 show but it is funny
the second third and probably every time. Nothing connects. There is no
through-line, no narrative, no hooks to hold one's sanity together. It is
dizzying, like being over-medicated on a very hot day. Ninety minutes is almost too much funniness.
When he walks off-stage saying, "I just remembered my
mother told me not to talk to strangers," we are left alone, all 2,000 of
us, laughing at the space where he stood.
He says he was mentally tortured as a child by a weird
grandfather and a witty but cruel father who "tried to make me go
insane."
He now values only obscure thought processes and tortures
the rest of the human race with convoluted yet somehow obvious concepts. He is
the child who made the teacher's head explode and the adult who drives every
victim to distraction - and weeping.
KATE HERBERT
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