Humor & Life Quote by Steven Wright

Steven Wright’s genius is that he treats language like a faulty appliance: plug in a normal sentence, and it sparks in the wrong places. “I had some eyeglasses. I was walking down the street when suddenly the prescription ran out” starts in the register of bland autobiography, then yanks you into a world where paperwork behaves like gasoline. The joke isn’t just that prescriptions don’t “run out” mid-walk; it’s that modern life trains us to experience our bodies through administrative metaphors. Vision becomes a subscription service. Clarity is conditional.

Wright’s deadpan voice (and the clipped simplicity of the setup) is doing crucial work here. He doesn’t wink at the audience or decorate the premise. He states the impossible with the confidence of someone reporting the weather, which forces you to momentarily accept the logic before it collapses. That microsecond of belief is the laugh: you realize how easily you’ve been trained to treat bureaucratic rules as physical laws.

Subtext-wise, it’s a small satire of dependency and control. A prescription is supposed to help you see; Wright flips it into an invisible leash. One minute you’re functioning, the next you’re “expired,” not because your eyes changed, but because the system says your authorization ended. It’s also a jab at consumer culture’s quiet cruelty: even your ability to navigate the street can feel like it’s rented, renewable, revocable.

Context matters: Wright’s ’80s-era one-liners arrived amid peak institutional absurdity - insurance forms, fine print, the growing sense that reality comes with terms and conditions. He just makes those conditions literal, and suddenly the sidewalk looks like customer service.