I couldn’t repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.

Steven Wright is known for deadpan, one-line jokes that mimic everyday speech while exposing absurd logic. This line is typically presented as a stand-alone gag in his stand-up repertoire, framed like something a mechanic might say after servicing a car. It plays on the familiar anxiety of trusting experts with safety-critical repairs and the frustration of receiving an irrelevant “upgrade” instead of a fix. While widely circulated in quotation collections and joke lists, it is most often encountered without a precise date or venue attached, reflecting how Wright’s short bits are frequently excerpted and repeated outside their original performance context.

The joke hinges on a perverse substitution: failing to solve the real problem (brakes) but compensating by amplifying a warning signal (horn). It satirizes misplaced priorities and superficial problem-solving—addressing symptoms or optics rather than underlying causes. The humor also comes from the implied logic that if you can’t stop, you might as well be louder about it, a darkly comic take on risk management. More broadly, it pokes fun at institutional or professional incompetence dressed up as helpfulness, where “improvements” are offered as consolation for an unresolved, potentially dangerous failure.