Paula Poundstone Opens Up About the Highs—and Lows—of Her Comedy Career

Paula Poundstone may have essentially invented “crowd work”—as the process of turning conversations with members of an audience into comedy is known today—but she still hates the term. “If I’m walking down the street and I say ‘Hi’ to somebody, is that street work?” she asks.

In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Poundstone opens up about her unlikely path to becoming a comedy icon in the 1980s and ’90s and how it all nearly came crashing down after her arrest in 2001. She also reflects on her frosty relationship with Johnny Carson, reveals how her own early brush with “cancel culture” made her think about second chances, and a lot more.

About five years ago, Poundstone decided it was finally time to do what every other comedian was doing and start a podcast. She called it Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone, and she’s still not sure how many people are actually tuning in.

“The podcasting world is very much like the economy as a whole. There’s the 1 percent, and then there’s the rest of us who are wrestling with whether or not we should still be doing it,” she tells me. “I fall into the latter category, sadly.”

The only reason she’s still making the show 250 episodes later, Poundstone explains, is that she loves hearing from the listeners she does have that her podcast helps them get through the day. “Not that I need someone else to suffer so that I can feel good about myself,” she jokes, “but I think we’re all suffering in these recent years, and to hear that I somehow lightened someone else’s burden is hugely valuable to me.”

So, is that why she got into comedy?

“I do love the response of laughter,” she says. “So often people will talk about who they think is funny and who they don’t think is funny. And I think to myself, boy, I try to think as many people as I possibly can are funny. Because it’s so much fun to laugh.”

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Poundstone still remembers a sentence from the summary letter written by her kindergarten teacher when she was growing up outside of Boston in the mid-1960s: “I’ve enjoyed many of Paula’s humorous comments about our activities.”

“So it was something that I glommed onto early,” she says, explaining that she thought she might be a comedic actress precisely because when she started out in the late ’70s, there were so few female stand-up comics on the scene. “Before I started stand-up—and maybe still after—the people I was inspired by were Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore, Lily Tomlin, Gilda Radner, you get the idea. And I missed by a country mile.”

Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by subscribing to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.

Your 1990 HBO special Cats, Cops and Stuff is the pinnacle of this type of “crowd work.” It’s still among the all-time great stand-up specials I’ve ever seen. Did you feel at the time how special it was?

No. When we went to make that, I was with this management firm at the time that had a relationship with HBO. And they come to me and they say, “HBO wants to give you an hour special.” That’s fantastic, that’s very exciting. And then they said, “They don’t want you to talk to the audience.” And I actually said—and I have to give my younger self credit for this—“Then why are they hiring me?” Because Hollywood has a long history of, “We’re gonna hire this person, and we’re gonna ask them not to do what they do.” So I was just like, well, that doesn’t sound like a good idea. And they said, the reason you can’t is we can’t hear the audience when they talk. Now you have to keep in mind, this is a long time ago, and so the technology has changed. And it’s not just a matter of the other people in the room hearing them, it’s a matter of the television audience hearing them. So I went to the mat on it, and said, “It doesn’t make sense for me to do this if I can’t do what I do.” So they hung microphones from the ceiling all over this room. And they had a guy with a boom mic who would haul ass over to the person I was talking to. I would indicate who I was going to talk to, but not begin getting them talking until the boom mic was over there.

You really have to be aware and present to make that work. That sounds hard.

It was! And apparently, I’m assuming from the response of the HBO people in my management at the time, it really hadn’t been done that way before. So we’ve done all this prep and expense in order to allow me to have my way and do this thing that I really enjoy doing. So I go on stage the night of the show and I think the way it unfolded was somebody made some sort of a response to something that I had said, and I turned in that direction and I said, “You sir, what do you do for a living?” And he says he’s an attorney. And a lady further to my left goes like, “Ahhh!” And everybody turned towards her—and now I think I forgot about the boom mic guy entirely—and I turned to that lady and I go, “What is it about lawyers that you don’t like?” And she was cagey, she wasn’t going to say, and I pushed her and pushed her. That’s what it was.

Thank God you did.

She didn’t want to say it and eventually she blurts out that her mother fell in a service garage and ripped her face off on a lube rack. And when I heard those words, all I could think of—my response was totally based on the fact that I had made HBO make it so that I could do this, and now I have uncovered a story that it’s very possible the show will never recover from. Because it is not a comedic story. It is a tragic, sad, awful story. She didn’t say my mother got injured, she said, “My mother ripped her face off on a lube rack.” And I’m picturing the HBO people sitting out in the truck where they have the screens of the different camera angles being so pissed at me. And somehow, there’s something about that chemistry, that magic that I am not in control of, that I couldn’t repeat, I couldn’t set up again, I couldn’t make it happen with all the genius engineers in the world. There was something about my response and what that woman said that just struck us all as so funny in that moment. And people come up to me all the time and say, “Are you gonna do the lube rack thing tonight?” And I go, I don’t think, no.

Not sure that would work.

Yeah, because that’s the other thing, people sometimes come up to me after shows and wonder if the people that I talked to were some sort of a setup. People had this idea, because that ended up being such a funny and odd pillar of the show, that it was pre-planned. And I always say to people, that would require several things for that to have been set up, and probably the most off-putting to me is the “e-word,” effort. No, it was not set up.

I’m sure it’s not your favorite thing to talk about, but I do want to touch on what was obviously the low moment of your career, when you were arrested in 2001 for what was called “child endangerment.” Did you consider quitting comedy at that time? Was it hard to keep going after that?

Was it hard to keep going? Yeah. And did I consider quitting? I guess so. I mean, I don’t think I thought, well, I’ll quit. I think I thought I might not be able to do it anymore.

They might not let you do it anymore.

Right, exactly. And I’m still not in charge of that. I’m not in charge of who comes out to see me. All I can do is get up every day and try to do better. It’s not like I can reel back time. And clearly, if I could, I would. I would do things differently.

This all happened so long before the current conversation about “cancel culture.” I’m curious if your own experience makes you think any differently about those issues, and whether people deserve a second chance to come back, to redeem themselves, and to move on.

Yeah, I think everybody deserves a second chance. And it’s not that hard to give it to them. A second chance at what is a good question.

What does that mean to you?

There are times where I feel like there are people that are doing things that sort of bring us all down. And if they use that “second chance” to continue that trajectory, well that’s a big problem.

I think you certainly did get a second chance and you’ve managed to continue having a really successful comedy career in a lot of ways. How did you want to use that second chance?

This is going to sound really stupid and sappy, but a long time ago, in the midst of feeling guilt and shame and sadness, and wishing I never drank, I realized I had children to raise. And getting up every day and wallowing in those feelings wasn’t going to get the job done. And so it’s not that my head and my heart don’t go in that direction occasionally. But I said to myself, in a very conscious way, I need to get up every day and try to make the world better. Both for my children, and for the whole, in some way. And so every time I find myself drifting into that other thought process, that’s what I replace it with. And I’m not talking about astronomical changes. I haven’t healed the sick and lifted the dead. I’m just talking about that whatever little way I can, I make a very conscious effort to do that. And I think for the most part I’ve managed to do that.

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That’s so admirable because, as you said, you see a lot of cases where people have these things happen and then they kind of dig in the other way. They say, “OK, you don’t want me? I’m going to double down on continuing that behavior.”

Well, in case anybody listening is on the fence about quitting the devil drink, I’m not the first to say it, but life in general is so much easier. There’s so many myths about alcohol, so many songs, so many movies, so many ideas about what it does for you. And the answer is, it does nothing. It makes everything worse. If you have a problem today and you decide that you’re going to drink through the problem, I can guarantee you that that problem is going to be so much larger by the time you put that drink down. And, by the way, I also had a mentality about drinking back then, which is, “Boy, it’s a great day, what a happy occasion, I should have a drink!” Or, “Oh my gosh, I’m depressed, I should have a drink!” Or, you know, “I don’t really feel anything today, I should have a drink.” So when you’re finding that the answer to everything is “I should have a drink,” you’re probably in fairly dangerous territory.

When you stopped drinking, what effect did it have on your ability to do comedy? Did it change anything for you on stage?

Oh, I’m much better, much better. I had a fear at one point that I was a better ping pong player drunk. But looking back, I don’t think that’s true.

Listen to the episode now and subscribe to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.

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