"I went to a restaurant that serves "breakfast at any time". So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance"

Steven Wright’s humor lies in its dry delivery and ingenious wordplay, and the line about ordering “French Toast during the Renaissance” at a restaurant promising “breakfast at any time” is a prime example. The phrase “breakfast at any time” is typically understood to mean that customers can order breakfast foods at any hour of the day or night, the kitchen will cook up pancakes or eggs at 10 PM just as happily as it would at 7 AM. Wright, however, adopts a much more literal approach to what “any time” might mean. He takes the restaurant’s promise and humorously twists it, not only across the axis of daily hours, but across centuries.

By requesting “French Toast during the Renaissance,” he conflates temporal concepts, interpreting “when” as not bound by hours or days, but by literal historical eras. This mental leap exposes the absurdity of literal interpretations and highlights the flexibility and ambiguity often present in language. The comedic impact is heightened by the incongruity and impossibility of eating a modern dish like French Toast during an era several centuries before its invention, and by the expectation that such a service be possible.

Wright’s joke also pokes fun at the culture of customer service, where exaggerated claims are often made to entice patrons. By stretching the offer to the point of absurdity, he draws attention to the often-ridiculous ways in which businesses market themselves and caters to customer desires. In doing so, he leverages surrealism and logical inconsistency, common elements in his comedy, to provoke laughter and also a subtle meditation on semantics and expectation. The humor emerges from the contrast between a perfectly normal request, ordering French Toast, and an utterly impossible demand, ordering it in a historical period well in the past, prompting audiences to re-examine everyday language and promises with a new sense of curiosity and amusement.