Have you ever called on your phone and then realized when someone answered that you didn’t know who you were talking to? Paula Poundstone can relate.
“I use a flip phone, and when I walk the dog, which I do a lot, I get bored,” Poundstone said during a recent telephone call. Seconds into the conversation I felt like I was a lucky audience-of-one at a private Poundstone show; she explored the subject the same way she shares her thoughts on stage.
“Basically, I usually say to myself, ‘Well, I’ll call this person or I’ll call that person,’ right? And a couple times now, I have forgotten to — usually like I dial before I leave the house — well, it’s not really ‘dialing,’ but you get the idea — and twice now, I have done this really stupid thing. Where ’cause once I’m out in the sun, I can’t see the screen. So I’ll say to myself, ‘Well, you know, I can kind of see something on the screen, I think this is the number here,’ and then I’ll push the thing and it’s not the right person. And then they answer.
“One person answered, so happy that I had called, and I didn’t even know who it was for a few seconds! So I just like faked it for a few seconds, until I knew who it was and then pretended that I had called not accidentally.”
Will Poundstone talk about telephone calls when she’s on stage Saturday at the Hawaii Theatre? Probably not. She’s never been one of those slick comics who takes the stage with, as Billy Joel famously put it, “a stand-up routine,” that she’s memorized forward and backward and inside out. Poundstone says she’s never done well trying to memorize a routine before showtime.
“Generally speaking, I decide just before I go on stage what the first topic is going to be. Oftentimes its about my experience getting there or some sort of local reference. After that, I have no particular plan. I have 45 years of material floating around in my head somewhere.”
Poundstone was not quite 20 when she started doing stand-up in Boston. Several years of hometown open-mic nights inspired her to try her luck in San Francisco; Poundstone made the cross-country journey by bus and stopped off at the open-mic nights along the way.
Poundstone became a “name” on the San Francisco stand-up circuit. A chance meeting with Robin Williams in 1984 resulted in a move to Los Angeles. Later that year she appeared on “Saturday Night Live” and was cast as the heroine of a “Star Wars” parody known variously as “Hyperspace” and “Gremloids.”
Four decades later Poundstone has scored with HBO comedy specials, television and film work, several comedy CDs, two books, recurring appearances as a panelist on the National Public Radio show, “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me,” and as the co-host of her namesake comedy podcast, “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.”
And there’s stand-up. Poundstone entertains with a seemingly effortless blend of keen observational humor and by improvising off whatever members of the audience give her to work with.
“Sometimes it’s the people down front, but often it isn’t,” she said. “My manager used to tell people that I knew who to choose, like I had some sort of way of choosing, which is entirely not true. It’s very random, and it’s just talking to anybody. For 45 years I’ve been asking people what they do for a living, and I can’t thinkof what the person told me the other night, but it was a job that I had never heard of. And that was fascinating.”
