I was in Little League. I was on first base: I stole third. I ran straight across the diamond. Earlier in the week, I learned the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. I argued with the ump that second base was out of my way.

Steven Wright is known for deadpan, logic-twisting one-liners that treat everyday situations as if they were governed by literal, abstract rules. This joke draws on the familiar childhood setting of Little League baseball—where “stealing” bases follows strict conventions—and collides it with a newly learned geometric principle (“the shortest distance between two points is a straight line”). The humor depends on the persona of a child (or childlike narrator) applying classroom math with pedantic seriousness to a social game whose rules are not optimized for efficiency. Wright used this kind of faux-naïve reasoning throughout his stand-up in the 1980s and after.

The line satirizes the mismatch between theoretical knowledge and practical, rule-bound reality. By treating base-running as a pure optimization problem, the speaker exposes how “common sense” can become absurd when a principle is applied outside its proper domain. The joke also plays on the double meaning of “out of my way”: in baseball, second base is mandatory en route to third, but in geometry it is an unnecessary detour. Wright’s deadpan style makes the illogic sound like a reasonable argument, highlighting a broader comic theme in his work: the world becomes strange when language and logic are taken too literally.