Poundstone
Question: Welcome back to Ohio in advance. Do you perceive audiences being different in different states, or are fans the same no matter where you go?
Paula Poundstone: I think probably more of the latter. I mean, not the same, but we tell ourselves that we’re more different than we are from state to state. First of all, we’re all exposed to the same stuff: the same media.
I play to the best crowds, I’ve got to say. I don’t mean the biggest, but the nicest and the most fun. When I come offstage, sometimes the crew people will kindly acknowledge — not a lot, quite honestly — but every now and then, they’ll go, “Nice show” or something. I go, “You know what? It’s because the crowd was really nice."
Q. It's always been noted that you pick people out of the crowd to go back and forth. Does it take nerve to do that?
Poundstone: After all these years, it’s only really gone south on me once or twice. It didn’t destroy anyone’s life, but it’s happened a couple of times where the person just wasn’t a good person to talk to.
I was in Hartford, Connecticut, last weekend, and I would say, “What do you do for a living?” “Well, I’m an English professor.” Well, we’d talk for a few minutes, whatever, and then in an entirely (different) section of the theater, somebody would say something and I would go, “Hey, what do you do for a living?” “Well, I’m an English teacher!” There were five English teachers! So, percentage wise, there was no way I was just picking out the English teachers. It was a convention or something! It was the funniest damn thing.
Q. Do you find people have changed a lot since COVID?
Poundstone: I don’t find them much changed now in the way that I did when I first started back. I felt like we were all like the Munchkins, coming out and being a little bit fearful. When I first started back out again, the circumstances of the theaters were changed, which is they were spending their lives with unnecessary
cleaning products. They would advertise that they wiped down all the surfaces between shows. Thank you for that waste of time! But the other thing is, remember there was a period of time where people had to be seated apart from one another and the capacity of the theaters was limited. The truth is, I still couldn’t sell out, even with the limited capacity theater, because a lot of people were still afraid, with good reason, to go out.
I started back in June and I worked through December (of 2021), and then I was going to be home for a couple of weeks in December, and the next thing I knew, my January jobs were canceled because of Omicron. Fortunately, that only lasted through February and I was back out again. And ever since then, I’ve been working. Now, there still are people where (my) show ... may well be the first that they’ve gone to since all this happened to us, and people say stuff like, “Oh, I haven’t laughed that hard in years.” And I’m like, “Wow, that’s awful.”
Q. Which comics make you laugh?
Poundstone: I love Bob and Ray (Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding). I sometimes do benefits with Lily Tomlin ... and she remains just so brilliant and so funny and so great.
Sometimes on Twitter, people will
say that they’re really depressed or something. There’s a very strange trend I think on Twitter right now, which is when someone dies ... like, literally I’ve read tweets that said, “My husband died an hour ago,” and I’m just like, “What a weird thing.” These people should get solace and help in whatever way they can, but how strange — like, “Don’t you have something else to do then?”
Anyway, when people say ... “I’m really depressed” or “I’m not doing well” or whatever, I always write back and say, “Make sure you’re drinking a lot of water, walk near trees,” and I often prescribe Bob and Ray.
Q. Do your stand-up fans overlap with fans who know you from 'Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!'?
Poundstone: They didn’t always know that the other existed. I’m not sure that this is the case anymore, but there was a team, probably earlier on doing “Wait Wait,” where I would have these NPR fans come to my shows and I think they were just baffled that I wasn’t answering questions about the week’s news. And then other people in the crowd had vaguely heard of NPR.
The other thing that (“Wait Wait”) brings me, a lot of times, is younger fans. Their parents would put it on in the car on their way to their basketball game. For my kids, it came on on the way home from swim lessons, and by the way, my kids wouldn’t listen!
Q. One thing your radio fans don't get is that you're perhaps the most stylish stand-up comic - your suits, your ties. Was your sense of style part of you early in your career?
Poundstone: No, it wasn’t. I used to buy clothes in stores (off) the rack. In fact, I had a friend who I was very influenced by, fashion-wise, for a while, and a lot of the clothes that I bought when I shopped with her hung in my closest with the tags on forever. I never wore them. I was too malleable to go, “No, that would look great on you, but it wouldn’t look good on me.” It took me years to go, “You know what I’m thinking?” And sometimes what you’re thinking isn’t in the stores!
So, I was working with a wardrobe person one time on a different project altogether, and she showed me these costume houses in Los Angeles, which are amazing! Huge places that literally have street signs inside. That’s how big they are. It’ll be like: “Men, 1940s.” Very detailed. I said, “You know what I’ve always wondered about is a zoot suit.” She got me one to try on there in this place, and it was really boxy and too angular. I said, “It doesn’t look the way I thought it would look.” She said, “Well, we could take it in here and cut this here.” Not to that actual suit.
She and I designed a pattern and then she took me to fabric stores, experiences I had never had before. When I was younger, I worked clubs, so I would be in the same place for five nights in a row. I felt the need — I guess to impress the waitresses — to wear something different every night. I don’t know how I stood it. I used to wear cowboy boots many, many years ago. I literally would bring like three pairs of cowboy boots so that I could switch them out. Now, I’m in a different place every night, but even if I wasn’t, I would just wear the same damn suit!
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