Steven Wright Albums (2)
'I Still Have a Pony'
Release Date 1/1/2007
Tracks 13
Label Comedy Central
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
The reason it took deadpan, surreal, and cerebral comedian Steven Wright more than 20 years to release a follow-up to his supreme 1985 album, I Have a Pony, was that he knew that if he wanted to keep performing live he would have to have a third album's worth of material. After all, if you give his fans a recording, they'll listen to it repeatedly, day after day, memorizing the set to the point where they could do Wright's material as well as he could. The audio version of his Comedy Central television special When the Leaves Blow Away, I Still Have a Pony is an album worth the 20-year wait, and no doubt you'll soon know someone who can repeat it verbatim. It's filled with great stories -- like when Steven gets fired from the pet store for braiding the snakes -- and those sharp one-liners that run the spectrum of strangeness from the almost Henny Youngman-esque "I bought an iPod that can either hold 5,000 songs or one phone message from my mother" to the truly weird "She would drink so much she would slur her pauses." If there's a way to tell this Pony from its predecessor, it's that the practically asleep comedian is somehow even more comfortable and displays plenty of trust that his audience is smart. Smart enough to take some stories that aren't really jokes, but witty and bizarre ramblings that play with words and reality itself. He uses these merely witty moments as left jabs between his right hooks ("My friend has a trophy wife, but I don't think he won first place") and breaks up his set by grabbing the acoustic guitar and delivering a couple songs like truly evil "The Kitten Song" and the great "Mumble Song." "Wind chimes are for stupid people so they'll know that there's a breeze." Great stuff that will keep his cult as they always have been: loyal and laughing. ~ David Jeffries, All Music Guide
'I Have a Pony'
Release Date 12/28/1999
Tracks 14
Label Wea International
See Album Tracklist and Review
What The Critics Say
Frizzy haired-yet-balding comic Steven Wright quickly set himself apart from other standups with his sleepy, wry, mumbled, deadpan one-liners. Wright's act is captured on his 1985 album I Have a Pony, recorded live at Wolfgang's in San Francisco and Park West in Chicago. His absurdist style is a weirder slant on the kind of observations of everyday life provided by other comics -- Jerry Seinfeld for instance. It's amazing that I Have a Pony is actually broken down and labeled with individual tracks since the vast majority of Wright's material is rarely more than a sentence or two each. Wright's priceless bits include buying powdered water but not knowing what to add; buying used paint in the shape of a house; putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in a room and letting them fight it out; 6,000 ants dressing up as rice to rob a Chinese restaurant; and keeping his large seashell collection on beaches all over the world. A joke that seems to obviously be about the Rolling Stones is actually about The Flintstones. Two of his best jokes on I Have a Pony actually have a brief buildup; he tells "a beautiful blonde Asian woman" who's a nymphomaniac turned on by Jewish cowboys that his name is Bucky Goldstein, and on "Jiggs Casey" he tells the student loan director from his bank that instead of making his payments he's given his money to his friend who used it to build a nuclear weapon -- and he'd appreciate not being bothered anymore. Wright strums a bit of acoustic guitar and sings on the girlfriend tale "Rachel," but first he teases the audience and says he's going to play everything the Beatles ever recorded -- without doing all of "Hey Jude"! ~ Bret Adams, All Music Guide
