You can't have everything. Where would you put it?

This line is a characteristic Steven Wright one-liner from his early stand-up era, when he became known for deadpan delivery and surreal, literal-minded twists on everyday sayings. Wright’s comedy in the 1980s often took familiar bits of folk wisdom (“You can’t have everything”) and then undercut them by treating them as practical, physical problems rather than moral advice. The joke fits the persona he cultivated in club sets and televised appearances: a laconic observer who exposes the oddness of ordinary language by following it to an absurdly concrete conclusion.

The humor comes from collapsing an abstract proverb into a logistical question. “You can’t have everything” usually means desires are limitless and life requires compromise; Wright replies as if “everything” were a pile of objects that must be stored somewhere. The line satirizes consumer appetite and the fantasy of total possession, suggesting that even if unlimited acquisition were possible, it would create new constraints—space, order, and the burden of managing what you own. More broadly, it showcases Wright’s signature method: revealing how clichés rely on metaphor by refusing to treat them metaphorically.