Paula Poundstone will perform at Wichita’s Orpheum Theatre on Saturday, May 10. Poundstone is a regular panelist on NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” and hosts the weekly podcast “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.”
She recently discussed her comedy act and her relationship with NPR in a conversation with KMUW.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you find your comedic voice?
My act is largely autobiographical. I talk about what I’m doing. Sometimes I tell stories, particularly if there’s young people in the audience, which there are here and there — like, really young people, kids — I’ll tell stories about when I was growing up. When I first started, I was 19 years old, living in Boston, so I talked about bussing tables and taking public transportation. My favorite part of the night is just talking to the audience. I do the time-honored, “Where you from? What do you do for a living?” I kind of use that from which to set my sails. No two shows are the same. I certainly have material. I have 46 years of material rattling around somewhere in my head, so I figure out where I’m going and what I’m talking about a lot based on who is sitting in front of me.
That requires observation and being in tune with people. That can’t always be easy. There’s some real work involved.
Nah, it’s just a conversation. We have conversations all the time. There’s a part of our conversation that is standardized. “Hi, how are you?” for example. And often we’ll say, “Fine,” and then, within a couple of sentences, if that many, then we say something less standardized. Then we say, “Oh my God, my kid’s driving me crazy,” or “Gee, I’ve been on the phone all day trying to deal with some bureaucracy.” So, it really is a conversation. We’re all used to responding either in a standardized way or in a unique way to conversations multiple times a day sometimes. I don’t really have conversations multiple times a day, but some people do.
[Laughs.]
I really have a pretty isolated life for the most part because I work alone. Sometimes my most gratifying conversation is with the woman at the CVS. And that goes for any CVS! Not a woman I know. That’s a big part of my day, clerks.
[Laughs.] That takes me back to what we went through five years ago. There was a point around 2020 where I was just happy to talk to the mailman.
Yeah. During the stay-at-home order, one of the only places I went to was the grocery store. You mostly just saw [everybody’s] eyes above their masks. Everybody looked so depressed and scared. I had no income, like many Americans at that point, and so I applied for work at a couple of different grocery stores. Neither one hired me. But my fantasy was that I — I like physical labor, so I’d be happy to put cans on shelves — would work some place and be able to, within the scope of my grocery store work, that I would be able to say to people, “How you doing? We’ll get through this! Keep your chin up!” I would be able to interact with strangers and somehow cheer them up a little bit in addition to doing my physical labor job.
Trader Joe’s still sends me alerts when they need employees. But Vons, which is where I shop, wanted nothing to do with me. You send in an application and go back to check, and I went in one day and said, “Can I talk to a manager?” They said, “Yeah.” I said, “I just sent in an application” and the woman went, “Oh, gee, yeah, we had just hired 12 people.” I said, “Well, would it be OK if I checked back?” “Oh, yeah! Yeah, that would be OK.” I walked away and thought, “Well, since I’m here, I’ll get some groceries.” I was pushing my cart down the aisle and all of a sudden I hear this voice come over the PA that goes, “Do you want to work at Vons?” Turns out that they meant anyone but me.
[Laughs.]
I should have stopped shopping there, but I didn’t.
I’ve never been hired for a retail job. One time I did apply for a job at a bookstore and didn’t get the job. A friend of mine who worked there called me after and said, “You’re not supposed to tell the truth on your application.”
Wow! What was it that you said that he thought was too revealing?
The application was I think designed for recent high school graduates, which I was not. I was well beyond that at the time. So, there were questions like, “Did you miss a lot of school?” I thought back to when I was 15 or 16 and checked, “Yes.”
Wow. I used to work at a bookstore. Nobody gave a … if I missed a lot of school or not. I used to live in the Back Bay/Copley Square area of Boston when I was a young adult. There was this bookstore which back then was called Paperback Booksmith. I think the company went out of business, but the franchisees probably had the option of buying the store, therefore the guy changed the name of it to Brooding Books.
It was the kind of place where if I was going to get together with friends, we would sometimes say, “Well, let’s meet at the bookstore.” That way, if someone was a few minutes late, you didn’t even care because you were wandering around the bookstore. When I used to go in there as a customer, the person at the register was always reading. They would stop reading to ring up your purchase when you went out, but I thought, “Oh my God! That job! I like that job!” I applied for work there and indeed I did get hired. One of the first things I was told was that they had changed the rule. No one could read at the register anymore.
“Wow! Boy, that sucks.” It was the lowest paid job I think I’ve ever had. The guy who owned it, who I liked, he said that being around the books was somehow payment.
[Laughs.]
I have a housekeeper who comes once a week. She was here today. I should have said to her, “Being around the cats is payment.” It didn’t occur to me to borrow that line but it’s a good one.
We are an NPR affiliate. You’re part of NPR. Was NPR something that was big in your life before you came into the radio fold?
Yes, I was. I’m a public radio listener, for news. Don’t tell them I said this, but I never listened to “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me!” prior to going there. But I’ve been a listener for the news for as long as I can remember. The importance of trustworthy news has never been greater than now. Let me put it this way: I was a very unsuccessful student, and I feel like to some degree the “NewsHour” on PBS and the news on NPR have raised me from a pup.
