Comedian Paula Poundstone was at the Lobero on January 24. | Photo: Courtesy

Paula Poundstone bounded onto the stage of the Lobero last week wearing a big friendly smile and a bright red suit, armed with the same type of conversational, down-to-earth humor she’s been charming audiences with for more than 40 years. “We have been through so f#@cking much, have we not!” was her greeting.

As the audience laughed a bit ruefully, she added, “We’re all responding the way brains respond. … It’s crazy-making to be lied to every day.” Her theory, which she shared earlier in our preview interview and again on stage, is that when you get older, your memory gets worse as a response to stress. I could see the boomers in the audience nodding in laughter and agreement as she shared a story about not being sure of the name of a woman who she worked with on the crew of NPR’s comedy news quiz show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! — for the past seven years! 

“And when I walk around my house now, I put up notes in each room of the reasons I might be there,” she said. For example, in the fridge there’s a “note to self” that says “the thing in your hand — does it go in here?”

She shared several stories from “the Larry experience,” her name for the adventures with her extremely fat, untrainable, and clearly beloved cat Larry (one of ten adopted cats in her life at the moment, though she’s had up to 16). “It would be easier to teach him to play chess than it is to get him to chase a ball,” she said. Although cat nip apparently works wonders in the motivation department. Later in the show, she made a merchandise pitch for her “Poundstone Pussy Pillow” cat toys stuffed with, you guessed it, cat nip. 

Nostalgia was also a big topic, as she reminisced about the days with limited channels, fewer hours, and not even any television remote controls.  

At some point in the evening, as she is wont to do and does quite well, Poundstone stopped with her own stories and turned to the audience for theirs. Her trademark crowd work/banter is something that fans have come to expect and adore. This particular Santa Barbara group didn’t give her a lot to work with (“Is everybody here retired?” she asked at one point), but Poundstone still managed to spin a bit of comedy gold from straw. 

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