Humor & Life Quote by Steven Wright

Wright’s joke is a perfect micro-dose of his signature deadpan: a sentence that starts like mundane autobiographical filler and ends by treating language as if it were literal plumbing. The comic engine is the phrase “prescription ran out,” a perfectly normal way to talk about medication, grafted onto eyeglasses where it doesn’t belong. In one beat, he exposes how often we speak in pre-made idioms without noticing the quiet absurdity inside them.

The intent isn’t to paint a detailed scene; it’s to short-circuit the listener’s autopilot. “Walking down the street” cues a familiar, low-stakes setup. “Wearing glasses” narrows the frame further, inviting an expectation of everyday inconvenience. Then Wright swaps in bureaucratic logic - the idea that vision is a consumable benefit that expires mid-block, like a coupon or a subscription. That sudden administrative intrusion is the subtext: modern life trains us to experience our own bodies through paperwork, renewals, and the anxiety of lapsed coverage.

It also works because it’s emotionally flat. Wright doesn’t mug for sympathy about being unable to see; he reports it like a weather update. That dryness forces the audience to do the work of imagining the consequences, which makes the absurdity feel sharper, not softer.

Context matters: Wright’s 1980s-into-now persona is the alienated, slightly dazed observer of American systems. Here, he turns a tiny quirk of phrasing into a miniature satire of how institutions and language conspire to make reality feel negotiable - until the “prescription” runs out.