Comedian Steven Wright performing stand-up at The Orleans

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You know you’re talking to Steven Wright the second you hear that just-woke-up voice on the phone. But you wonder if his mind works in the same bizarre, off-kilter way it does onstage.

Sometimes, yes.

No surprise the comedian famous for deadpan one-liners would cite Kurt Vonnegut as “one of my heroes.” Meeting the late author was “one of the most exciting things in my life.”

The two became friendly enough to share phone numbers. “I was in London one time at a house Charles Dickens had lived in for two years. It was like a museum thing. I think he wrote ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ in the house. And down in the basement of the house there was a gift shop with a pay phone there. I tried to call Kurt Vonnegut from Charles’ Dickens house.”

You ask what makes a comedian laugh? This memory does it for him. “Just for the absolute insanity of being in one genius’s house from another century, calling another genius. But (Vonnegut) wasn’t home. He had no machine, so it just rang and rang.

“That’s complete surrealism, even though it’s all real,” he adds, beginning with “the fact that there’s even a phone in Charles Dickens’ house.”

Wright has become a perennial at The Orleans, serving up his signature one-liners: “The other day I was — no wait, that wasn’t me.” Or, “I have the ability to levitate birds. But no one cares.”

Those jokes from his 1997 milestone album, “I Have a Pony,” would seem to be a prototype for Twitter. But when Wright started a Twitter account himself, what did he do?

Start to write a short story in serialized bursts, that’s what. More Dickens than Vonnegut, it turns out.

Was that his idea of a joke? The ultimate in defying expectations? Mocking the trendy new medium?

“Some people left messages: ‘What the hell is this?’ ‘I thought this would be perfect for you.’ ‘Doesn’t he know how this is supposed to work?’ ”

It wasn’t that calculated, he says. The less-devious inspiration was rereading a short story he once wrote for Rolling Stone.

With everyone else trying to be Steven Wright on Twitter, “Something about it didn’t interest me. I’m trying to break it down for you and I can’t get much further than that,” he says.

It’s not so much the idea of giving up jokes he can use in his act for free, as much as those jokes needing to be said out loud. “Without the person involved, me and the audience, it’s kind of like, just laying there.”

That said, don’t think his time with Vonnegut didn’t plant the seed of committing his absurdist humor to print. Vonnegut “told me that if you can get to 70 pages, then it just goes. Most people can’t get to the 70 pages.”

For now, Wright sticks to his stand-up dates and rereading Vonnegut. “I just read (the novels) occasionally because I need to read it. His imagination just jazzes me up. It’s just so alive and fertile, it just makes me feel good to read an imagination I absolutely admire. It still affects me like I was in college and I read them. Wow, what an angle on the world.”

Wright says he’s never tried to add up how many jokes he’s written over the years, and doesn’t think about it until someone asks him. He’s not jealous of other comedians who work long-form and can stretch a yarn instead of landing four or five jokes per minute.

“I started out doing it like that, and it wasn’t until years later that I realized how dense it was compared to other people,” he says. “By then it was already what I was doing naturally.”

Wright has been working Las Vegas since at least 1997, when he played the Sahara. The old showroom there had been home to comedic idols such as Don Rickles and Buddy Hackett.

“My initial reaction was like, ‘I don’t know if I fit in there.’ It just had another generation vibe to it. But I did it anyway. They didn’t have to convince me over years or anything,” he remembers. “But then when I went there, my generation was already going there. My comedian peers, I mean.”

Las Vegas, he says, is “like a big spaceship flew over. A big gigantic spaceship and it took a turn, it was too quick, and part of the ship fell off, onto the ground, and that’s Las Vegas.”

“I like how stimulating visually it is, and the sound and light and weirdness. It’s just so surrealistic,” says this expert on such things.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.