Photo: Michael Schwartz
A Life in Comedy
by G.W. Mercure
When talking with a performer who has had the career that Paula Poundstone has had, it’s tempting to ask big-picture questions (especially right now). Poundstone’s career has spanned a very meaningful range of generations and changes, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, as cable television—VH1, MTV, Comedy Central—grew rapidly as a peer but not a replacement for the traditional nightclub circuit. The late shows welcomed performers whose reach was expanded by cable television, and the sitcom became the holy grail for rising comedians. Today, a podcast is de rigueur for new and established comics, and social media reels have taken the place of VH1’s three-minute videos for rising and unknown comedians. The timeline of Paula Poundstone’s career is a near-perfect parallel with that range of time. Others have shared that timeline, of course, but few have remained as relevant.
So, what has she observed in that time? “Well, you have to spend a lot of time on a computer now,” she says.
For Poundstone, an unvarnished interaction with a live room is the only real currency left. A fixed script or a retroactive gaze is dead weight when your entire creative engine depends on what is happening in front of your face right now. “Since it’s all done in my head—these performance aspects—I have no way of knowing what’s going to work and what’s not,” she says. “On a good night, probably about a third of the show is spontaneous and unscripted. My favorite part of the night—and this is not new by any means—but my favorite part of the night is just plain talking to the audience.”
Poundstone never became irrelevant because she bypasses the indicators and measurements of relevance altogether. She remains vital by working on the ground. Instead of tracking stream metrics, she spends her nights creating two separate, grueling daily video series—one a polite, direct address titled Hey, Donald Trump, and another tracking the countdown to the midterms. “I walk around at this point in a constant state of exhaustion,” she says of the self-imposed schedule. “Both of them are just sucking the life from me. I mean, they’re fun to do, and I’m glad I’m doing them, but boy, I’m exhausted.” That daily commitment to immediate, volatile reality is what feeds her stage act, creating a performance style built entirely on raw reflex.
That reflex is exactly what she brings to the Cape this summer for her upcoming dates with the Payomet Performing Arts Center, a region she first encountered decades before the modern comedy boom. “The first time I went to Provincetown was with a church group when I was a kid,” Poundstone laughs. “Our Christian youth group used to take an annual trip there, and we would bike on the bike trails. We did not go during Bear Week. I think they were careful to make sure it was a ghost town when we arrived; we went out of season.”
When she returns to the Cape this season, audiences can expect that signature baseline of unpredictable human messiness, entirely uncorrupted by technology or data tracking. In fact, if she has her way, the digital world can wait outside. “I don’t know anything about technology,” she says. “Someday, I want them to make voting day a legal holiday, but also a legal holiday where we just erase our old emails.”
Poundstone doesn’t have much to say about history books and has no inclination to play along with the entertainment industry’s obsession with its own archive, preferring to leave the macro-evolutionary tracking to the cultural commentators. Instead, she approaches the digital landscape with the practical irritation of a trade craftsman forced into unvetted labor. “A lot of the promotion for shows falls to the performer now because you’re expected to be posting,” she explains, shrugging off any romanticism for the modern era. “I spend a lot of my time saying, ‘I’m coming to the blah blah blah.’ I loathe self-promotion, and the part of sitting around saying ‘I’m coming to this place, to that place’ is especially tedious.”
Where other veteran performers carefully audit their legacy, she treats the data with pure skepticism. “I don’t know the origins of my audience,” she admits frankly. “I haven’t done an exit poll. Sometimes I do a meet-and-greet, and I end up talking to a lot of people throughout the night — although I say a lot more than the person does, because I’m a compulsive talker and they can’t get a word in. But people will tell me how many times they’ve seen me before. I don’t know why they feel the need to say this.”
That refusal to look back or analyze her own longevity is what keeps Poundstone firmly rooted on the ground. She remains fiercely relevant not because she remembers where American comedy has been, but because she is one of the few purists left who commands exactly what it is today. Artificial intelligence can easily catalog 40 years of digital archives and stream metrics, but it can’t handle a live performer who fundamentally refuses to play by the archive’s rules.
Paula Poundstone performs at Payomet Performing Arts Center, 29 Old Dewline Rd., North Truro, on Saturday, July 11, 7 p.m. For tickets ($45 – $74) and additional information call 508.487.5400 or visit payomet.org.
