I was arrested for selling illegal-size paper.

Steven Wright is known for deadpan, one-line jokes that treat absurd premises with matter-of-fact logic. This line belongs to his stand-up persona from the early-to-mid 1980s, when his minimalist delivery and surreal wordplay made him a distinctive figure in American comedy (including frequent television appearances and his 1985 comedy album). The joke riffs on the idea of petty, bureaucratic “crimes” and the arbitrariness of regulations, presenting an implausible arrest—selling “illegal-size paper”—as if it were a routine legal infraction. It exemplifies Wright’s style of compressing a whole comic world into a single sentence.

The humor comes from treating a nonsensical concept—paper having an “illegal size”—as a straightforward legal category. Wright’s deadpan framing mimics the language of law enforcement and commerce (“arrested,” “selling”), which heightens the absurdity by implying a hidden regime of overregulation where even stationery can be contraband. The line also plays on the listener’s familiarity with standardized paper sizes (letter, legal, A4): “legal” is a size, so “illegal-size” becomes a mock-technical opposite. The joke satirizes bureaucratic logic and invites laughter at how official language can make anything sound plausible.