SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Feb. 2, 2023 (Gephardt Daily) — I had the genuine privilege of interviewing American comedy legend Paula Poundstone ahead of her Friday night show in Salt Lake City.
She will be appearing at the Jeanne Wagner Theater at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center on Feb. 10 at 7:30 p.m.
Poundstone got her start at open mic nights in Boston in the 1970s, then performed at clubs across the country until she arrived in San Francisco, where she stayed until she made the move to Los Angeles in the mid-80s.
She can be heard weekly as the host of the comedy podcast, “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone” and as a regular panelist on NPR’s comedy news quiz, “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!”
Also an author, Poundstone’s second book, “The Totally Unscientific Study Of The Search For Human Happiness” was one of eight semi-finalists for The Thurber Prize for American Humor, the highest recognition of the art of humor writing in the United States. The audiobook was one of five finalists for the Audio Book of the Year AUDIE award.
She was the first female comic to perform at the White House Correspondents dinner, in its then 73rd year in 1992. She was the first female standup, in its then 5th year, to win the ACE award for Best Comedy Special on Cable television.
Poundstone has also appeared in movies and television shows, performed in many comedy specials and won multiple awards for her work. Time Magazine named her HBO special “Cats, Cops, and Stuff” one of the five best comedy specials of all time; the special has been turned into a comedy album.
Watch the podcast below:
DAISY: Well, good morning, this is Daisy from Gephardt Daily and I’m honored to be talking to Paula Poundstone today. Paula, you have a massive list of things that you’ve done; you’re recurring panelist on “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me.” You have a podcast called “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.” You’ve written two books, you’ve performed in comedy specials; I could go on all day about your achievements, and we’re totally thrilled that you’re coming to Salt Lake City; the Jeanne Wagner Theatre on February 10 at 7:30 p.m. And I just wondered if you could tell me a little bit more about this current tour that you’re on.
PAULA: Well, it’s not a tour like on the back of a sweatshirt. It’s an unending tour. It’s only interrupted you know by, by COVID. I did do that 15-month stay-at-home order. But outside of that. Let’s see. It’s just me for one thing, because I’m too selfish to share my audience with another act. I love the crowd that comes to see me. I talk about; it’s largely autobiographical. No two shows are the same because my favorite part of the show is just talking to the audience. I do the time-honored: “Where you from, what do you do for a living,” and in this way, little biographies of audience members emerge and I use that from which to set my sails. So I never I never quite know entirely how, you know, what the subject matter will be. But again, largely autobiographical, I’m one of those people who everything that gets said reminds me of something that happened to me once. Oh good. A big dog just came in the room.
DAISY: Yippee, he’s welcome. So I talked about; oh, look at that handsome fella.
PAULA: Isn’t he? This dog is 10 or 11 years old and it was just maybe a year ago diagnosed with congenital heart disease. It’s amazing what they can do. They inserted a tube into his chest and drained my bank account. Yeah, it’s amazing.
DAISY: You were just telling me you have 10 dogs and two cats, sorry, excuse me. Ten cats and two big dogs.
PAULA: Yeah, 10 cats and two big dogs. And I used to have bunnies. I didn’t let them procreate. I just kept going out and buying more. But my bunny days are over. But I do. In fact, just before I came on, I had to get up and wipe up some cat vomit on the rug. You know, you get so used to it after a while. You don’t even leap up when you hear the sound anymore honestly.
DAISY: And I assume you don’t take any of your pets out on the road with you?
PAULA: I have in the past; I had a cat one time who had an eye problem and she needed ointment putting her eyes five times a day. At that time, I was just having somebody come in a couple of times a day when I was on the road to take care of the pets. Now they actually have someone who stays with them, so I wouldn’t have had to but I gotta tell you, but that cat’s name was Smike and she loved the hotel. She was like, she was like Eloise, she was just delighted to be staying in a hotel. She would order like a hot chocolate at night, she had a lot of room service, she would have them come in and turn the bed down for her. She was delighted with hotel life, enjoyed the heck out of little soaps.
DAISY: And I was gonna ask you that too. Do you do like the practice of touring? Do you like the traveling and the hotels and the different cities and all that?
PAULA: I love the audiences that come to see me; they’re my best friends. And so the part of you know, my head wobbling over in the airplane seat. The stiffness that comes over your, your joints from sitting in an airplane for so long… not so much. That is not my favorite part of life. But if it’s required in order to go see my best friend, absolutely. You know it’s not the worst thing in the world; I’m not coal mining. It’s… they do offer you a soda if you’re awake for it. So there’s that.
I, by the way, I’ve been on the road, I’ve been a comic for 43 years now. And I’ve been traveling for the majority of that 43 years, at least a couple nights a week. And only maybe two years ago did I stumble on the solution of, when I get on the airplane and I usually wear a baseball cap in my regular life. When I get on the airplane, the first thing I do is put a blanket that I carry with me over my head. It’s, it’s travel genius. No one you know sees me my head bobbing around anymore. No one you know; there’s no fear of photographs showing up on the internet. You know, my tongue hanging out. So it’s good. And nobody bothers you once you put a blanket over your head either, even though they may think it’s strange and the brim of my hat with the blanket over it creates sort of a little cocoon…
DAISY: Like a little cave!
PAULA: It is! I can read in there. I can eat without people staring… it’s good.
DAISY: Do people recognize you and come up to you a lot when you don’t have the blanket over your head?
PAULA: Well, no, because they’re wearing seat belts. No, I’m not a household name. Although in my house I insist on it. No, I go, I don’t have to worry about crowds flocking to me. I don’t; I remember years ago reading the Britney Spears had to have a store closed. In order to shop at it. I have not reached that burdensome level of fame.
DAISY: Not quite yet.
PAULA: I think I’m in the clear. I think between now and when I die, I don’t think I will have achieved; I think I’ll be able to shop with the others.
DAISY: And I was gonna ask you, you you mentioned just now about the audience being your best friends. How was the pandemic for you?
PAULA: Very lonely. Yeah. If it was lonely, obviously for everybody wasn’t exclusive to performers or to me. But if you were a musician for example, oh, Mary Chapin Carpenter. Mary Chapin Carpenter had the NewsHour on PBS, which I watch pretty religiously. They did this piece about how she was doing these concerts from her living room. And the dog would come in and it was so intimate. It was so wonderful. And it was as if you know it was as if the whole thing benefited her somehow I mean, they just thought it was the greatest thing in the world.
Well, as a comic, you can’t tell jokes standing in your living room. I could make videos you know, just sort of comedy videos the way that I sometimes do. But I couldn’t do stand up in my living room and a lot of people tried to get me to in the beginning, a lot of charities that I’ve done work for that now couldn’t have their gala. And so they tried to put it online. And so it was a real struggle, to figure out how to communicate with the audience and do my job. And the truth is, it really couldn’t be done.
And, and what it created was, I can’t really hate Mary Chapin Carpenter. It created a rift between me and a woman I’d never met. I have to confess that I’ve told that Mary Chapin Carpenter story before. I guess I said it in, I said it in in an interview early on. When I was just starting back out on the road. And one of my first jobs after the stay-at-home order was somewhere in Virginia. I’ve forgotten where now, and I’m at the theater and I go into the dressing room and there’s some flowers there and with a card and you know sometimes the theater will give you flowers, it’s very sweet, but I didn’t rush over and open the card because I thought it came from this theater.
And after a while, I was about to go on and then I you know, I should open it so that I know who to thank so it opened the card. And this piece of paper falls out and it’s a copy a transcript of an interview that I had done wherein I tell the story and say that I hate Mary Chapin Carpenter… and the flowers; at the bottom of the card: “I love you anyways, Mary Chapin Carpenter,” and I thought, “Oh, come on.” So I get my flat thing, and I Google Mary Chapin Carpenter, and she lives in Virginia, as it turns out. Yeah. So we’re close now.
DAISY: Were the flowers like Deadly Nightshade?
PAULA: They were sprinkled with anthrax. No, she had a very lovely sense of humor and got that I was kidding to begin with. And now, and now, I have this little, now I have an additional Mary Chapin Carpenter your story to tell, because that was, that couldn’t have been sweeter. That was very kind.
DAISY: No, that was very kind. And um, I’d like to rewind a little bit to when you were a kid and I wondered was was comedy always your plan? Was that was that just what you wanted to do?
PAULA: It wasn’t always my plan, I don’t think, but it was often my plan. Summary letter written in I think it was May or June of 1965 by my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Bump.
DAISY: Mrs. Bump; what a great name!
PAULA: Isn’t it the best name, if Dickens ever, you know, I don’t think they had kindergarten back then. But if there had been? Would not that be like a Dickens kindergarten teacher? Well, they wrote a summary letter in lieu of a report card back then, in our kindergarten, and the first sentence of the last paragraph says “I’ve enjoyed many of Paula’s comments about our activities.” And I have a copy of that letter enlarged and framed. It was, my mother used to keep the letter in a drawer where she kept the report cards in the kitchen. And so I, it was, it was something that really meant a lot to me that an adult enjoyed anything I did. Because I don’t think most of the things I did adults enjoyed at all. Which by the way, just goes to show how adults, we can influence kids simply by acknowledging the good part. Oh no, I have to say, I mean later teachers didn’t think that was a good part but good old Mrs. Bump, who by the way just contacted me recently. We had been in touch in more recent years but I had lost touch with her for a while and and she wrote me an email. It’s the subject line of which was “I’m still alive.”
DAISY: She must be so proud of you.
PAULA: I think she likes it that that she influenced me. I mean, who wouldn’t like that? I wish I could influence my kids. I can’t, but I wish I could.
DAISY: So I was gonna ask you that as well. What other things in your life bring you joy other than comedy and your audiences?
PAULA: Well, lots of things. I love ping pong. I don’t play often enough, but I do love it. I try to keep some… during the during the stay at home order I started doing… I started, I decided that I wanted to be able to do real push-ups.
DAISY: Oh gosh, they’re so hard, aren’t they?
PAULA: So hard, and I don’t think mine probably look like, if I were to show what I do to a Marine, he’d be like: “Nah, that’s not how you do it.” But I did get this idea that I wanted to, you know, build up to doing real push-ups and so I started the little program of just you know, working out but with a very small, and then build it, and I used to post it on Twitter all the time every time I exercised, and I call it my improvements, I said I’ve done my improvements and over time, I was up to… I didn’t even start with real push-ups. I started with push-ups from your knees that somebody told me about the ones you do on the wall and then you move your feet back slowly and then you move to a counter and I kept those up. But I did finally begin doing real push-ups. And I would increase by one every week. And I unless I didn’t feel strong enough to increase by one in which case I just stay where I was. But in the end I was up to 70-something.
DAISY: You’re joking… 70-something?
PAULA: Yeah.
DAISY: That’s amazing!
PAULA: Yeah, now I walk a lot because I walk the dogs. If I didn’t have dogs, I wouldn’t walk. If you had to do push-ups with your dogs, I would probably be still doing push-ups, because that would motivate me. Yeah. So anyway, so you know, I’m aware. It’s not like oh, I love to exercise. I don’t. But I am aware that it’s part of happiness. It’s one of the things that deploys happy chemicals in the brain. And, you know, I really try to take command of that as much as I can.
DAISY: Yes. Are you a foodie? Do you cook?
PAULA: Um, no, no, do I cook? I like good food, but I don’t really cook. You know I can, I can saute in fake butter.
DAISY: Okay.
PAULA: Yeah.
DAISY: That’s cooking…
PAULA: Yeah, that’s about my… I ate a lot of rice and beans in the last few years that I can, I could soak the beans overnight and then cook them all day. We can do that. But I don’t know if you really call it cooking.
DAISY: I’d say it was cooking.
PAULA: Well, I’m in for… it involves a heat source.
DAISY: Yes. And then just finally, Paula. You’ve done so much already. What other things are on your bucket list that you would like to do?
PAULA: I have this idea for an animated show. And I’m gonna, I think what I’ll probably end up doing is making it just, you know, with the internet, you know, because I think it’s a really fun story idea that I have and you know, when you come up with an idea for something sort of large. One of the ways you can tell if it’s a good idea for me anyways, is that it keeps coming up in your daily life. You keep thinking, oh this here, here’s an example. When, when my oldest daughter was nine years old, I came home one day and she was sitting on the floor of the front room, and she would play, and she would come to me and go: “I wish I was married.”
And I said: “Well, you know, marriage.” I said: “What what is it about marriage you think you’d enjoy?” And she said: “The dress,” and I said, “Okay, I think you’re conflating two things. I said: “Marriage is a partnership with another person. Usually there’s sex involved, and you and you, you know, you sort of plan your lives together,” and and I said: “You know, I think you’re too young for that. But it sounds like what you’re talking about is a wedding.” And I said: “A wedding you could have,” and I was half kidding when I said it. But when we finished up our conversation, I walked away. These ideas about my daughter’s wedding kept coming into my head. And so we planned her wedding. And it was so great. Originally, she was going to do the wedding ceremony with a friend from school, and then she got jilted. Really.
DAISY: Oh no!
PAULA: So we had a neighbor kid come in. And we have like 50 attendees, [actress] Kathy Najimy did the ceremony. You know, and when I asked her if she would do it was a very brief phone conversation. She goes: “A wedding, not a marriage, right?” And I said: “Exactly.” And she got the thing right away, right? So one of the things she said in her in her ceremony was the genius of just having a wedding and not the marriage. And the kids had, let’s see, my middle daughter was the flower girl. My son, who was just walking at the time, was the ring bearer. And he was at that koala phase in life where he wouldn’t get down and walk. He just wanted me to carry him all the time. So we made a row of Cheetos up to the front. And he ate his way up, he was in a little tuxedo.
People remember that event, including my daughter, by the way, when I was at an event where I was talking to somebody about it, and I was standing near [singer] Jackson Browne, and I have to confess that I knew he was listening when I told the story about it. And he’s like, I purposely was sort of I was talking to this friend, but I was sort of pointing it towards Jackson Browne. And he says to me, he goes: “Do you have anybody to do the wedding march?” And I said: “We already were looking into somebody to do the wedding march, but I went no, we don’t.” And so Jackson Browne did the wedding march.
DAISY: You are joking me.
PAULA: I’m telling you. It was so much fun. The honeymoon was at Baskin Robbins. We had we had the boys on bikes riding in front of us in a convertible back then. And we had a “Just Married” sign. I mean, people honked and waved at the girls. They had so much fun.
And the thing is going back to the original reason I’m telling this story is that when I walked away from my daughter from the initial conversation, I kept having ideas about her wedding. And I said to myself, You know what, we have to do this because it’s just so much fun to think about. So, that’s my, that’s my that’s my creative test. You know, did it to the thoughts about that project interrupt your daily life? And if they do, then by golly, you should do that thing.
DAISY: I wonder if your other kids are going to want weddings as well.
PAULA: Ah, they’re all grown up now. And, and honestly, I wouldn’t be that excited about a real wedding. I can take them or leave them. I feel like people spend too much money on that stuff. And there’s too much stress and too, you know, so you almost get off on the wrong foot because there’s so much stress. The great thing about Toshia’s wedding was that there were no stakes. You know, again, there’s no you can’t do anything wrong. Because it’s, you know, because, and then we played ping pong afterwards. So it was a hallowed event. And people years later, we’ll come up and say: “Oh, my gosh, I remember Toshia’s wedding.” Because that was a long time ago. She’s, she’s older.
DAISY: Has she has she gotten married again since then?
PAULA: No, no. I think when it goes to that, well, you don’t want to you don’t
want to…
DAISY: No, you don’t want to mess with it. Well, Paula, we can’t wait to see you. Just to recap again. You’re here on in Salt Lake City on February 10, 7:30 p.m. At the Rose Wagner, and all the information about your tour and podcasts et cetera, et cetera is on paulapoundstone.com. And people can get tickets there. And thank you for being so generous with your time. It’s a huge pleasure to talk to you.
PAULA: It was fun talking with you. Thank you so much.
DAISY: Thank you and we’ll we’ll see you in Salt Lake. We’ll look forward to that. Thank you, ma’am.
PAULA: All right. Take care.
