Who does Louis C.K. consult on what’s funny? Steven Wright

Steven Wright's deadpan one-liners add up to more than 300 per show. (Courtesy)

Because Steven Wright is so specific with what he does in comedy — the spacey one-liners, delivered in that unmistakable deadpan — it’s hard to imagine him doing anything else.

But Louis C.K. could.

On the acclaimed FX comedy “Louie,” Wright is credited as a consulting producer, which is about as vague as job titles come. So what does he actually do?

“(Louis) bounces the stuff off me. We discuss whether I think it’s funny or not,” says Wright, who is back at The Orleans, his longtime Las Vegas home, on Friday and Saturday. “He tells me the stories (or) I read the stories, and I give him my opinion of it.”

Wright often follows the process through location shooting and the editing room as well.

“It’s very interesting because stand-up is such an isolated thing,” he says. “I’m not complaining, that’s just what it is. You just do it all in your own head. I don’t discuss anything with anybody. I write it, I try it out, I figure out what I want to keep. There’s no discussion at all.”

He compares Louis C.K. to a TV version of that one-man band, “and it’s like he asked me to sit in with his band.”

Wright is a one-liner comic, and “Louie” is as far from a one-liners sitcom as a half-hour comedy can get. But fans of both can identify an area of overlap: surrealism.

Wright’s jokes turn reality inside out, and many a “Louie” episode will start with a relatable, universal situation — often as a single dad trying to do the best he can — and take a sharp left into a bad-dream realm.

“He tapped into — not my style, but my idea of what’s funny,” Wright says. And it’s refreshing to stretch out.

“I have billions of opinions on things, but what I write is specifically in this very narrow window,” he says. “I’m not complaining, that’s just how it is. It’s surreal and it’s these quick things, and that’s fine. But my mind thinks of many other things that don’t go in that window.”

The window keeps him busy, though. Wright figures he does 20 jokes in five minutes, or about 320 jokes in an 80- minute set. Though the delivery is slow, “the amount of material is gigantic.”

Wright’s material also stands apart from Louis C.K., or any number of confessional comedians sharing relatable experiences. He’s 59, and like other stand-up contemporaries, grew up memorizing comedy albums by Woody Allen and George Carlin.

But he says someone would have to dig back to his earliest days to find any “normal comedy I almost can’t believe that I said onstage,” he says with a laugh. “About 70 percent of it was one-liner jokes right from the beginning.”

“I never really talked about anything from my real life,” he adds.

“The jokes started with surrealism and abstract stuff, that’s just what happened. People don’t know anything about me other than that I like the Red Sox.”

Read more from Mike Weatherford at bestoflasvegas.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com.