Humor & Life Quote by Steven Wright

A Steven Wright line works the way a magic trick does: it shows you the mechanism and still leaves you stuck on the feeling. "Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time" is a perfect little cognitive car crash, built from two conditions everyone half-understands from pop psychology. Amnesia is the loss of memory; deja vu is the eerie conviction you remember this exact moment. Put them together and the brain short-circuits: how can you feel recognition while being unable to remember anything?

That contradiction is the engine, but the intent is sneakier than a mere word mash-up. Wright’s deadpan persona treats an impossible internal state as a casual weather report, flattening catastrophe into "right now". The humor comes from that mismatch between the supposed clinical seriousness of the terms and the mundane, tossed-off delivery. It’s a joke about how we narrate our own minds with borrowed vocabulary: we pull labels from therapy-speak and science articles, then use them like emojis for confusion.

Subtextually, it’s also a miniature satire of modern consciousness: living in loops, overstimulated, feeling like everything is familiar and nothing is retained. The line captures an anxious late-20th-century vibe (and an even more current one) where experience is continuous but comprehension is lagging. If you’ve ever scrolled for an hour and emerged both oddly sure you’ve seen it all before and unable to recall a single thing, you’re already inside the joke. Wright just gives that feeling a crisp, paradoxical sentence and lets the absurdity indict the rest.