Legendary ace comedian Paula Poundstone talks touring, Trump
STEVEN LINDSEY | Contributing writer
stevencraiglindsey@gmail.com
Nobody goes off on a tangent quite like Paula Poundstone. No matter how rambling a story may seem at first, it often ends up with the audience doubled over with laughter. For the past 45 years, she’s been commenting on the world around her, pointing out life’s most absurd aspects for the enjoyment of millions in a career that’s meandered almost as much as one of her hilarious anecdotes.
But whether she’s performing for an NPR crowd on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, a sold-out theater at one of her standup shows, or a silent audience during her Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone podcast, if people are laughing, she’s in a good place. Or as she might put it, good enough.
The accomplished comedian returns to Dallas this Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Winspear Opera House. To help get the word out about her show, she chatted with me for more than 30 minutes, a virtual reunion more than three decades in the making.
Steven Lindsey: Hey, Paula! I’m so happy to talk to you again. It’s been about 33 years and last time we met, I nearly killed you. My special events committee had booked you for a standup gig at University of North Texas, and I got to drive you back to your hotel in Las Colinas [and] somebody nearly ran us off the road. It terrified you so much you stopped talking the rest of the drive. Wow! I don’t remember that at all.
Great! You’re not traumatized and I have a fun cocktail party story all the same. Win-win. Colleges often had the students come pick me up. I liked talking to them. There was this one time a group of kids had come to pick me up and, you know, they were usually the theater students. And one of the perks of being a theater student was you got to go pick up the “celebrity.”
And so this particular trip, it was someplace rural, and it was a really long distance between the airport and the town. I was sitting in the front seat and I could see a billboard in the distance, and I saw the name of a pizza place. So I asked the kids, “Hey, isn’t Pizza Plenty around here somewhere?” Oh my, it worked perfectly. They were delighted. I don’t remember if I ever confessed that I’d just seen a billboard, but I like to think I left them thinking that somehow Pizza Plenty was so well-renowned.
Why is it that people get so excited anytime you mention something specific about a town when you’re on stage? I don’t know why that is exactly. But older people get this weird sense of propriety. One of the things I notice in the audience, they’ll have maybe a business or street name or a bridge or river or even the name of the town that is pronounced not phonetically. It’s like Prescott, Arizona, which is pronounced PRESS-kit. But it’s actually spelled P-R-E-S-C-O-T-T and by any measure pronounced Press-SCOTT. But they are rabid about it. If you say Press-SCOTT, they get very upset. And I think it’s like a way of identifying outsiders.
That’s so true. People are very territorial. It’s passed down for generations on who to hate or dislike. True. We’re trained to pick something to hate about other people. And you know who knows this? Knows this to his core? Putin. Putin is an evil motherfucker, but the guy really is a genius of human behavior. Think about how he likely is responsible for having us in the mess we’re in and a lot of it just comes from a silly warehouse full of people typing into social networking and getting everyone all upset.
I listened to one of your podcasts where you talk about the moment when you find out a friend or someone you know is a Trumpy. Do you drop them or try to find common ground? I think there’s one, my best friend’s stepson. I think he did vote for Trump. I don’t know what he did the second time. But I have never talked to him about Trump. Because I like him — the stepson, not Trump!
What can people expect from this show? I have in my head 45 years of material floating around. I tell people it’s a little bit like being in one of those arcade games where you step into a glass booth, and they blow paper money around, and whatever you can grab you can keep. I think that’s what the inside of my brain looks like when I’m on stage. I just grab a piece of material as it flies by generally speaking. Two of my shows are never the same.
For tickets, visit ATTPAC.org.
