Comedian Paula Poundstone began doing standup in the late 70s at open mics in Boston, near where she grew up. Her observational style has always bridged boundaries and made her a regular on television throughout the 90s.
She appeared on Brendon Small’s (Metalocalypse) original UPN version of the cartoon Home Movies, where she hilariously lent her voice to the mother character, and recently appeared in the Pixar movie Inside Out (2015), where she voice acted as Forgetfulness. In 2006, Poundstone published her memoir There is Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say,, and now she is back on a tour doing stand-up.
Keep it clean
For Poundstone, it was never a choice between edgier or blue material.
“To be totally honest with you, I pretty much say whatever I feel like saying,” she said. “I don’t talk a lot about sex because my act is largely autobiographical, and [since] I don’t have sex the subject doesn’t come up for the most part.”
Because by nature, she is humble and honest in her perplexity, Poundstone has always been a very sympathetic performer— even in 1992 when she covered the political conventions for The Tonight Show.
“I never put myself out there as an expert on any topic. I’m only an expert on me, and even then, I’m probably wrong about a few things. So, I can give my views and also be open to the notion that I’m totally wrong,” she said.
“I’m not always right and I’m not always the most informed,” Poundstone confessed, despite being a regular panelist on the NPR weekly news quiz show, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me. “In fact, when I did the conventions that was part of what worked about it [and] I went there saying ‘I know nothing about this,’ and I didn’t.”
“I think I talk about it with a sense of wonder more than anything else,” she continued. “Like why on earth should there have to be fact checkers after a debate? That is just crazy. Why is it okay for people to obscure, lie and manipulate? We all know about it too, but there’s somehow nothing we can do about it.”
Playing the crowd
One of Poundstone’s signatures is her ability to work a room, which began as a perceived deficiency. Whenever she got her five minutes at the open mic night, she would run into overtime, pissing off some of the other waiting comedians.
“I waited tables for a living, and if you watched carefully, you could see my lips moving while I was working, memorizing my five minutes,” she says. “I would go on and, mostly out of nerves. I would make a comment right when I got onto stage about something I saw in the room. I have no idea how long that took… [other times] I would forget what I was going to say and then fill in by talking to the audience or something. This was all viewed very negatively.”
“The really fun part is [when] I had no idea what I was going to do, and I’d say something I didn’t plan,” she says. “It’s a sort of a surprise to the crowd and it’s unique to that night. People love something that was made just for them, and the idea that were it not that particular group of people on that particular night at that particular location, it would’ve gone differently. It’s just a fun notion.”
“My favorite part of the night, I do the time-honored, ‘Where are you from? What do you do for a living?’ And, in this way, little biographies of audience members emerge,” said Poundstone, leading into a story of a woman at a recent show in Red Wing, MN.
“She worked in a cheese factory, making sure the cheese slices looked good— for 28 years! And she was so much fun to talk to,” Poundstone says. “I would ask, 'Did you work your way up?' Eventually she supervised people watching the cheese. But, she had a supervisor as well. Then she had her sisters on both sides of her, and her sisters appeared to have had much more pleasurable jobs. So I said, ‘You must’ve just hated them!’ and the three of them were crying [from] laughing so hard.”
Newfound love of the craft
As a young comic, Poundstone often fell into the trap of many young thinkers— the belief that suffering somehow aggrandizes the art.
“I had the idea that you somehow had to be tortured to be a good writer or comic. Life sort of slapped that out of me after a while,” she laughs. “I don’t know. I saw myself as Judy Garland for the longest time— [but] without the talent. I thought I would get a job, hide in my trailer and people would beg to come in.”
“When I look at some of the things I thought in my lifetime… It’s so humiliating,” she said. “I tell it to people because I know I’m not the only one, and I want people to be able to move through that phase more quickly.”
Poundstone feels that young comedians may be the most embittered misanthropic people in the world, but those that survive into their forties and fifties seem to find the beauty.
“I absolutely love [stand up]. I’ve been doing it for 36-37 years. So I’ve had the experience of it rescuing me a couple times from my own personal drama. I’ve had the experience of being really depressed or having troubles in my personal life, and having this job that is so goddamn much fun, being something I could go to and lose myself for the couple hours I am on stage,” she says. “And then, like Dr. Manette in A Tale of Two Cities, return to my shoe workbench. In the middle of the night you can still hear me tapping.”
“There is just the science of it," she continued. “Laughter is good for you. Being in a room of people that you connect with is good for the brain. ”
See me after the show
Indeed, Poundstone says the time she spends after the show just talking to people has become her favorite part.
“When I first started doing that I hated it. I never liked talking to people after the show. I thought there was something so strange about the focus going from the whole crowd to just one person. I wasn’t good at it at all and it made me so nervous,” says Poundstone.
“Now it's my favorite part of the night, because I talk to people and they talk to me, and they see me in this place and that place, they say ‘we have a son who’s just like your son’ or ‘your son should marry our daughter,’” adding that, “They say, ‘this is my first night out of the hospital, or this is the first time I’ve [been] out since my husband died.’ It really feels like such a privilege.”
8pm Friday, December 11 | $28-$50. Valentine Theatre, 410 Adams St. | 419-242-2787 | valentinetheatre.com
