67 of the Best Steven Wright Jokes on His 67th Birthday
Steven Wright has managed to accomplish not one, but three things most comedians could only dream of. The first is that his unique style of humor has transformed his name into an adjective to describe every absurdist one-liner comic that has come along ever since.
The second is instant recognizability. The exact second you hear his droll, deadpan voice, you know it’s him.
The third, and most important, is infinite rewatchability. No matter how many times you hear his jokes, you still laugh at them, and anyone who’s a fan of standup comedy can easily list off at least a dozen of their favorite jokes of his.
So, that’s why we’re giving you 67 of them today. Not just because today is his 67th birthday, but because we honestly couldn’t narrow down our list of favorites any more than this. Every time we tried to find one to cut from the list, we ended up remembering five more that deserved a spot. Enjoy!
“I have a telescope on the peephole on my door, so I can see who’s at the door for 200 miles.”
“I’m going to get a tattoo over my whole body of me but taller.”
“I was thinking about the new phone that I bought and the first thing I did was push redial. The phone had a nervous breakdown.”
“When I get really bored I like to drive downtown and get a great parking spot then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if I’m leaving.”
“I went into this bar and sat down next to a pretty girl. She looked at me and said, ‘Hey, you have two different colored socks on.’
I said, ‘Yeah, I know, but to me they’re the same because I go by thickness.’”
“Woke up this morning and folded my bed back into a couch. Almost broke both my arms cause it’s not that kind of bed.”
“Last year, I went fishing with Salvador Dali. He was using a dotted line. He caught every other fish.”
“Whenever I think about the past it just brings back so many memories. I remember the day the candle shop burned down. Everybody just stood around and sang Happy Birthday.”
“I spilled spot remover on my dog and now he’s gone.”
“Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time... I think I've forgotten this before.”
“All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand.”
“I think it's wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly.”
“I have a large seashell collection, which I keep scattered on the beaches all over the world. Maybe you’ve seen it.”
“I was in a job interview and I opened a book and started reading. The guy said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
Then I said to the guy, ‘Let me ask you a question: If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?’
He said, ‘I don’t know.’
I said, ‘Forget it. I don’t want to work for you.’”
“In Vegas, I got into a long argument with the man at the roulette wheel over what I considered to be an odd number.”
“A friend of mine once sent me a postcard with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from space. On the back it said, ‘Wish you were here.’”
“I was a peripheral visionary. I could see the future, but only way off to the side.”
“If you shoot a mime, should you use a silencer?”
“I got a new dog. He’s a paranoid retriever. He brings back everything because he’s not sure what I threw him.”
“Doing a little work around the house. I put fake brick wallpaper over a real brick wall, just so I’d be the only one who knew. People come over and I’m gonna say, ‘Go ahead, touch it…it feels real.’”
“I hooked up the accelerator pedal in my car to my brake lights. I hit the gas, people behind me stop, and I'm gone.”
“When we were driving over the border back into the United States, they asked me if I had any firearms. I said, ‘What do you need?’”
“I'm addicted to placebos.”
“I went to a tourist information booth and said 'Tell me about some people who were here last year.'”
“Do you think that when they asked George Washington for I.D. that he just took out a quarter? George trying to decide something: Call it in the air, me or tails.”
“My uncle was a clown for Ringling Brothers circus, and when he died all his friends went to the funeral in one car.”
“I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’
He said, ‘Yeah, but not in a row.’”
“In my house there's this light switch that doesn't do anything. Every so often I would flick it on and off just to check. Yesterday, I got a call from a woman in Germany. She said, ‘Cut it out.’”
“My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted.”
“I wrote a book. I have the page numbers done, and now I just have to fill in the rest. I wrote a song too, but I can’t read music, so I don’t know what it is.”
“My favorite chair’s a wicker chair. It's my favorite chair because I stole it. I was at a party, a very crowded party, and when no one was looking I went over to it and I unraveled it. I stuck it through the keyhole in the door. The girl that was in it was almost killed.”
“I’ve been getting into astronomy so I installed a skylight. The people who live above me are furious.”
“I went to a place to eat that said ‘breakfast served any time’. So, I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.”
“I was walking through the forest alone and a tree fell right in front of me. And I didn’t hear it.”
“I remember when I was a fetus I used to sneak out at night when my mother was sleeping. I thought to myself, ‘You know, now's the time I should start stealing some stuff since I don't have any fingerprints.”
“My girlfriend hates it when we take a bath together and I practice skipping rocks.”
“I stayed up one night playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died.”
“Whenever I pick up someone hitchhiking I always like to wait a few minutes before saying anything. I say, ‘So how far did you think you were going? Put your seatbelt on, I wanna try something. I saw it in a cartoon, but I'm pretty sure I can do it.”
“You know how when you put a stick in the water and it looks like it’s bent? That’s why I don’t take baths.”
“I hate when my foot falls asleep during the day, because that means it’s going to be up all night.”
“My friend George walked his dog all at once. Walked him from Boston to Fort Lauderdale and back, He said, ‘Now, you're done.’”
“Sponges grow in the ocean. That kills me. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn't happen.”
“I'm living on a one-way dead-end street. I don't know how I ever got there.”
“It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to paint it.”
“I've been making wine at home but I make it out of raisins so it'll be aged automatically.”
“You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?”
“Two babies were born in a hospital on the same day. Two little babies, they put them in the same room, they're just laying there looking at each other. Each family came and took their baby away. The babies live their entire lives, and eighty-five years later by a bizarre coincidence, they end up in the same hospital in the same room, laying on their deathbeds Just laying there looking at each other one of them says to the other one, ‘So… What did you think?”
“I knew I wasn't gonna be the first child born, even before I was born. There was graffiti in the womb. ‘Bob was here.’”
“We lived in a house that ran on static electricity. If we wanted to cook something, we had to take a sweater off real quick. If we wanted to run a blender we had to rub balloons on our heads.”
“For a while I was in the Centrifugal Air Force. I came home dizzy every night.”
“I can levitate birds but nobody cares. It's a good thing there's gravity otherwise when birds die they’d just stay right up there. Hunters would be all confused.”
“I entered the ‘Stranger Sweepstakes’. It’s a contest. You pay fifty cents, and you get a little card with a number on it. Then you go up to any stranger and scratch a penny on their head. If the number under there matches the number you have, you win $100. I won twice. I was beaten up eleven times.”
“I broke a mirror in my house, and you’re supposed to get seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five.”
“It was my birthday recently. For my birthday, I got a humidifier and a dehumidifier. I put them in the same room and let them fight it out. Then I filled my humidifier with wax, and now my room’s all shiny.”
“Everywhere is walking distance if you’ve got the time.”
“I called the wrong number today. I said 'Hello, is Joey there?'
A woman answered and she said 'Yes he is.'
And I said ‘Can I speak to him please?’
She said ‘No, he can’t talk right now, he’s only two months old.'
I said 'Alright, I’ll wait.'”
“I used to work for the factory where they make hydrants, but you couldn’t park anywhere near the place.”
“I went to a museum where they had all of the heads and arms from the statues that are in all of the other museums.”
“I bought this thing from my car, you put it on your car, and it sends out this little noise when you drive through the woods so deer won't run in front of your car. I installed it backwards by accident… Driving down the street with a herd of deer chasing me.”
“I'm writing a short story right now. It's the story of a photographer who goes completely insane trying to take a close-up photograph of the horizon.”
“I saw a sign on the highway that said NEXT REST AREA 25 MILES. I said, ‘Wow, that's pretty big. People must get really tired around here.”
“I was Caesarean born. Can’t really tell.. Although, whenever I leave a house I go through the window.”
“I got on an elevator and this old guy got on with me, and I was over by the buttons. I pushed number four and asked him, “Where are you going?’
He said, ‘Phoenix.’
So I pushed Phoenix. Doors opened and two tumbleweeds blew on. We stepped off and we were in downtown Phoenix. I said, ‘You know, you’re the kinda guy I’d really like to hang around with.’
He said, ‘I’m going out to the desert. You wanna go?’ I said sure, so we hopped in his car and started driving out to the desert. He told me he spent most of his life working on a research project for the government trying to figure out who financed the pyramids. He worked on it for thirty years and they paid him an incredible amount of money. He told me he was pretty sure it was a guy named Eddie.”
“So I was laying in bed with my girlfriend reading the second hand diary that I bought… ‘I don't remember this.’
She said, “Let me ask you a question: If you could know how and when you were gonna die would you want to know?’
I said no and she said, ‘Forget it then.”
“I was walking down the street, there was a sign stapled to a telephone pole that said: Reward, lost $50. If found, just keep it”
“I tried to hang myself with bungee cord… Kept almost dying.”
“I’m going to court next week. I’ve been selected for jury duty. It’s kind of an insane case. 6,000 ants dressed up as rice and robbed a Chinese restaurant …I don’t think they did it. I know a few of them and they wouldn't do anything like that.”
