Paula Poundstone, the delightfully intelligent and engagingly scruffy veteran comic, continues to be a leading voice of sanity in an increasingly nutty world.
Poundstone has been performing brilliantly unique stand-up comedy every week, around the world, since 1979. It’s oddly compelling that, in spite of her easy 10K times onstage, Poundstone might be best known for her current work on NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! A radio show. Radio!
“When I was younger, I didn’t even like public radio,” says the always refreshingly honest Poundstone. “I eat those words now, because I do love public radio, and I think it provides a really important service. But, you know, I was young and stupid. They just always sounded too whispery to me. And that kind of voice drove me crazy.”
Every week, for almost 50 years, Poundstone has traveled nonstop, across the country, making strangers laugh. And if you condense her arc, Poundstone went from working her way up from legendary San Francisco dives like the Holy City Zoo and the Other Cafe to touring the world.
When questioned, Poundstone—who thinks like Jack Kerouac writes, and talks with a stream-of-consciousness set of memories that contain a View-Master look at our rich regional comedy history—the answers come fast, so you need to keep up.
“You know, what I used to do at the Holy City Zoo,” Poundstone begins. “It’s a tiny, tiny place, if you’re familiar with it. And it had a chalkboard. Sort of not right directly behind the performer, but on the wall to the side of the performer. There was a chalkboard where they would have your name up in chalk. And so I used to delight in taking the chalk from that board and drawing. I can’t draw, not any way, but I would make stick figures of the audience. It was just a way in, and I liked it so much that I actually bought a chalkboard, and an easel, and used to take them on the road.
“I used it until, I believe, I was opening for Dave Mason. His roadies were putting their stuff away, and they just took it. And I never bothered replacing it,” Poundstone laughs.
The one thing you can’t manufacture, yet, is authenticity. It’s something people aspire to, or somehow fool themselves into thinking that their conformity is authenticity, but either you got it, or you don’t. And comedian Paula Poundstone has always had it. She was always there in her corner, always talking on and on and on, or napping with a blanket over her head—but mostly just waiting, patiently, to go onstage and create something new.
More than ever, people are talking about comedy. And there’s a lot of statistical analysis, AI-generated dialogues, and Bro Joes talking about the “best comics”—and their data is complete garbage. Because their sense of humor has been co-opted, monetized and sold back to them. It’s an ouroboros of ass-eating jokes for eternity.
On the other cheek, you have comics like Paula Poundstone. It isn’t about viral moments, or crowd clips, or what does AI think—it’s about the work.
“This is the greatest job in the world,” Poundstone starts. “You know, it really is. I mean there was, and I’m not proud of this, but there may have been a brief period, prior to the stay-at-home order, and maybe possibly where I complained about the travel. …
“I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know if we would ever be able to be in theaters again because of this virus. There was really that period where there was just such uncertainty. And boy, after that, you could put me in the overhead compartment and I’m fine, you know? I mean, I never needed fancy to begin with,” she concludes.
And that’s Paula Poundstone. She might phase back and forth between timelines, but she’s always in the moment, trying to find the heart of the matter—and make it funny.
Paula Poundstone appears at 8pm on Sept. 19 at the Rio Theatre, 1205 Soquel Ave., Santa Cruz. Tickets: $30/$45. riotheatre.com
