Deadpan that detonates: the style of Steven Wright. Morose, frizzy haired and balding, looking and sounding as if he’d just awakened from a daydream, Wright’s one-liners took a moment to reach and destroy the audience. First came the shock and surprise, then the explosion of laughter:

“It’s a good thing there’s gravity. If birds died they’d just stay up there…Sponges grow in the ocean. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be if that didn’t happen…What’s the youngest you can die of old age?...I got food poisoning today—I don’t know when I’m gonna use it.”

Wright’s slightly dazed persona could be seen on stage and off. On stage he might say, “I’m living on a one-way dead-end street—I don’t know how I got there.” In an interview, he said he wasn’t even sure how he made up the joke: “Something hits me. Just walking down the street. Something comes into my head. I might be talking to you now and all of a sudden write a joke about underwater photography. Like my subconscious is working on these jokes all the time, and the guy runs up to the conscious and says, ‘Here’s another one.’” After a pause he asked, “What was I saying?” Intentionally, but often unintentionally, it’s hard to know for sure where the stage persona ends and the real Wright begins.

Factually, it all began in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That’s where, late at night, young Steven listened to comedy albums on a local radio station. He memorized some of the Cosby and Carlin routines and performed them for his classmates. One strong influence on his style was sad-sack Jackie Vernon. Wright recalled a Vernon gag he always liked: “My father died. We buried him because he would’ve wanted it that way.”

After graduating from Emerson College, Wright began performing stand-up around 1979 in local clubs: “I watched a show in Boston with five guys, and I thought—this is going to be harder than I thought. They were very funny. It kind of scared me. I auditioned the next week. I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a style, I was just trying to be funny. I got some stuff together and tried to make them laugh. Not ‘I’ll be different, I’ll be weird.’ That never entered my mind.” His first gag: “I was in a bookstore, and I started talking to a French-looking girl. She was a bilingual illiterate. She couldn’t read in two different languages.”

Peter LaSally of “The Tonight Show” caught his act in Cambridge and booked him for his first major TV appearance, August 6, 1982. He was such a smash that, in a very unusual break from tradition, he was invited back a week later. Wright became a favorite on the comedy club circuit, recorded a Grammy-winning comedy album in 1986 and after some cable specials wrote and starred in “The Appointments of Dennis Jennings” for HBO. The film was shown in theaters and earned him a 1988 Academy Award for best live action short subject. That a made-for-TV piece of comedy ended up winning an Oscar was strange, but not in the strange world of Steven Wright.

Occasionally the Wright formula stretches thin, the one-liners becoming predictable: “I went somewhere to eat. The menu said “Breakfast Anytime.” So I ordered French Toast in the Renaissance.” All the jokes have one thread in common, a deliberately skewed view of the world around him. He described his act as “seeing the world through the eyes of a child and getting to use the words of an adult.” On the street, Wright admitted, “People still stop me and say ‘You’re the guy who doesn’t smile.’ But it’s just what happens when I’m working. Like a carpenter doing a house. If he was laughing hysterically while he was building a house—it’s insane.”

Wright’s particular brand of madness had a definite method: weaving some 300 jokes into an hour-long show with nearly 600 jokes discarded along the way. Even personal favorites of his were dropped if the audience didn’t laugh, a line like: “Babies don’t need a vacation but I still see’ em at the beach.” He admitted, “You have to fail so much to go ahead.”

At a time when audiences were unaccustomed to “thinking man’s humor,” a one-liner style out of favor since the prime days of Woody Allen, Dick Cavett and Jackie Vernon, Wright flourished. Though his future seemed secure, Wright still had his doubts. He said, “I’m a peripheral visionary. I can see into the future, but only way off to the side.” Asked in 1990 where he planned to be in 10 years he said, “In ten years I’ll be dead 8 years.” The world may or may not have joined him: “I think God’s going to come down and pull civilization over for speeding.”