Paula Poundstone once joked, “Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up ’cause they’re looking for ideas.”
Yet, it seems since childhood Poundstone was destined to be a famous comic as evidenced by her kindergarten teacher’s evaluation, “I have enjoyed Paula’s humorous comments on some of our activities.”
Fast forward to a remarkable career highlighted by several HBO specials, two television series (both entitled The Paula Poundstone Show) and two books in addition to Poundstone’s current hosting of the weekly comedy podcast Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone, appearing as a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me, and performing across the nation.
In November, she returns to the Broward Center for the Performing Arts. She took this interview at her California home standing behind all the notes and papers on her treadmill, which she uses only as a desk.
“I carry a pen on my pants and I have little pieces of paper everywhere,” Poundstone explained. “I am forever writing down little things that I think are funny and they go onto the stage as quickly as I can get them there.”
While she has a mental framework for each concert, Poundstone estimates that one-third is unique to that show.
“My favorite part of the night is just talking to the audience,” she said. “I do the time-honored, ‘Where are you from? What do you do for a living?’ In this way, little biographies of audience members emerge, and I use that from which to set my sails.”
Of course, Poundstone also mines her own life for her act which she admits is largely autobiographical. Her extraordinary success has also come from delivering observations that are relatable to her audience. They don’t need to be a cat owner like Poundstone to appreciate her often quoted comment that “The problem with cats is that they get the same exact look whether they see a moth or an ax-murderer.”
As the first female comic to host the White House Correspondents Dinner and having filed live coverage of both parties’ national conventions for The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Poundstone also looks to politics for material.
“I am not a political analyst or an expert or a historian or a constitutional scholar, and I know that shocks you,” Poundstone joked. “I feel I may be like the audience in front of me in terms of politics in that I’m hanging on by a thread. My act is definitely peppered with references to what’s going on politically but I wouldn’t call myself a political comic.”
In addition to her podcast, Poundstone has been posting “Hey, Donald Trump” videos speaking directly to the President, as when she questioned his subterfuge of riding in an airport catering truck to secretly move from Air Force One to an undisclosed plane in response to a threat on his life.
“How much damage did you do in that snack truck? Do you like those stroopwafel cookies? The two thin waffles with the caramel in between? I hope you don’t. The taxpayers can’t take much more of paying for your extravagances. Did you have the warm chocolate chip cookies with the ice cream sundae? By the time you got out of that snack truck they must have had to throw luggage out of the plane they switched you to for it to take off.”
In another series of postings, Poundstone has been counting down the days until the November 3 election while bouncing on a pogo stick.
“I have no idea why I did this, but I made a commitment to add a pogo on my pogo stick every day until we take back the House and the Senate,” she said. “There was a little period of time when I was maybe in the 170s, 180s, where I was really struggling to finish but, boy, I am whipping through the 190s.”
With that focus on current events, you would think that she would be the all-time champion on the Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me weekly news quiz.
“It surprises people because I lose so often,” she confesses. “I’m very competitive, I’m just not good and that’s a really bad combination. I choke even all these years later. In the lightning round, which I rarely do with a feeling of lightning, the answer will be obvious and I can’t come up with it for the life of me.”
Winning or losing, Poundstone continues to come up with hilarious takes on life as she has done since kindergarten.
“It’s a coping mechanism that nature has given us,” she said. “For me, it’s a knee-jerk thing. Sometimes somebody will tell me something that’s genuinely sad and they’re not expecting me to make a joke about it and I just can’t help myself.”
