Humor & Life Quote by Steven Wright

Steven Wright’s line is a deadpan magic trick: it takes a boring errand and reveals the absurd contract language hiding inside everyday life. “I bought some batteries” sets up the most mundane premise possible. The punchline, “but they weren’t included,” snaps the listener into a different genre of sentence, as if the purchase came with the same fine-print loopholes as a toy that requires AA’s or a gadget sold “separately.” The humor lives in that misapplied disclaimer. Batteries are the thing you’re buying; claiming they’re “not included” is logically impossible, yet emotionally familiar.

Wright’s intent isn’t to tell a story so much as to dramatize a tiny betrayal: modern commerce trains us to expect that even when we pay, we might not actually get the thing we thought we paid for. The subtext is consumer paranoia turned into syntax. The sentence mimics the voice of packaging and policy, then shoves it into a place it doesn’t belong. That displacement exposes how corporate language colonizes our thinking; we start hearing legal hedges in our own inner monologue.

Context matters: Wright’s entire persona is a kind of sleepwalking philosopher of inconvenience, delivering surreal one-liners with the tone of a customer service complaint filed against reality itself. The joke lands because it’s both stupid and true in the way late-capitalist life often feels: you can follow the rules, hand over the money, and still be told there’s an asterisk somewhere.