Wait, Wait… Please Tell Me

Still standing — and doing stand-up — after a long career that began with open-mic nights in Boston in 1979, Paula Poundstone still loves what she does, even after 45 years. The “shared emotional response” with the audience is what keeps it fresh for her.

“I have the best audiences on the planet — not the biggest audiences, but the best,” said the comedian during a recent phone interview in advance of her appearance at the Lobero on Friday, January 24.

“My audiences are really fun to work to,” said Poundstone, who, in addition to regularly doing stand-up at theaters across the country, hosts a weekly comedy podcast (Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone) and is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me. She’s also become an in-demand voice actor in recent years, starring as Forgetter Paula in the hit animation films Inside Out and the current sequel Inside Out 2.

Curious, I asked her how different it is to perform with a live audience versus in a studio. “It’s really different. I mean, in many ways less gratifying, of course,” said Poundstone. “I do some voices really, not particularly well, but very sort of silly stuff on the podcast. Stuff that I would never do on stage because I would be too shy in front of an audience. When I do it on the podcast, it’s a little bit like singing in the shower.” 

When people come to her at the live shows and compliment her on the voices, Poundstone said, “My jaw drops. You like it? I have no way of knowing that. … So it’s the good news and the bad news. The good news is because I don’t fear the censure of an audience, I’m more liberal with what I’m willing to do. And the bad news is, you just have no idea where or how it’s landing.”

As for the on-stage part of being in front of a live audience, Poundstone, who’s known for her excellent crowd work and for never doing the same show twice, said, “Everything that I’m doing on stage is a conversation. Sometimes, I ask rhetorical questions, I suppose, but … the whole thing is a conversation. Talking to individuals in the crowd really is just an extension of the conversation. It’s not all that tricky or difficult. I suppose if there’s any skill to it at all, it might just be knowing when to move on, which I have varying degrees of success at,” she laughed.

“I always say I tend to leave my line in the water a little bit longer than some other people do, because I’m not looking for anything in particular, and certainly not like some staccato, you know, joke. I feel like we get, like, little biographies of people and, and then it’s easy to refer back to them within the show, because they’re sort of, for lack of a better word, characters that the audience now knows, at least to some degree,” said Poundstone. 

“When I first started as a comic in open mic nights in Boston in 1979, the whole premise being that anybody could do five minutes and the stage time was of a premium, everybody wanted to get on stage, and the audiences were pretty hot back then. And so, if you went over your five minutes, it pissed off all the other comics. And I used to frequently go over my five minutes,” she laughed. “Not intentionally; what would happen is I memorized my five minutes. I used to bus tables for a living. If you looked carefully while I was waiting tables, you could see my lips moving because I was memorizing my five minutes to go on stage.

“And in my nervousness, I would either comment on something that the last comic had said, or I would see somebody in the audience, and it would draw my attention, and I would say something about it.” 

After doing this for a while, “it dawned on me that the best part of the night was the part where I had done what I hadn’t intended to do. Once I realized that, then I purposely set up a scaffolding where I allowed myself to do that.” 

As to what we’ll see in Santa Barbara on January 24? “I don’t know,” Poundstone laughed. “It could be anything. … I have 45 years of material rattling around my head somewhere. I could never diverge from material again and have plenty.”