“I'm just trying to make them laugh,” says Steven Wright. “I don't focus on emotion.” The 68-year-old comedian and actor, who’s built a career on setting the bar for the definition of “deadpan,” has for decades been known for his observational humor that rarely treads into the kind of personal storytelling that’s marked other comics of his generation. But when he sat down to write his debut novel “Harold,” Wright found himself tapping into a new side of his psyche.
“There's a lot of sensitivity in there,” Wright admitted during a recent “Salon Talks” conversation. “It is more emotion than the stand-up.” Told from the perspective of a third grader over the course of one December day in the mid '60s, “Harold” has plenty of the author’s trademark surreal wit (Harold, for example, muses that all art was modern at one point), but it also brims with a depth and a wistful melancholy that will catch Wright’s fans unexpected. "This was way more going into what I really think about all things,” Wright said.
