“I can’t stop talking to save my life,” confessed Paula Poundstone during her set last night before a big crowd at Clearwater’s Capitol Theatre. And for two hours, she proved it, in a consistently funny stream-of-comic-ness monologue that touched on everything from MSNBC to “The Little Drummer Boy.” Perched on a stool or prowling the stage, dressed in her characteristic zoot suit (purple plaid) and tie, speaking in that unmistakeable rasp with the hint of Massachusetts, she kept going and going and going, with only an occasional sip of water to fortify her non-stop bon mots.
Poundstone is, notoriously, a cat lady. (Her answer to the standard question of how she wound up with 14 cats? “I had 16, and two died.”) There’s a fair amount of cat in Poundstone herself. A mundane detail catches her eye, one that anyone else would pass by, and she pounces. The multiple electrical outlets on the lip of the Capitol stage: “Apparently, this is where they have the Florida State Vacuuming Finals.” The security guards at either side of the stage: “You're security? For me? Would you look at this crowd?” The man in the audience who tells her his profession is “general manager”: “You’re the general manager of… everything? Gosh, today's been going pretty great for me. It never occurred to me I'd meet the guy who made that so.”
And like a cat with a toy, she’s relentless, and relentlessly nosy. The general manager turned out to be head of an unnamed city’s sewer and water department, and Poundstone wanted to know what he did all day. He told her he started his day writing checks to vendors. “Vendors? What, do you have a fucking ice cream man over at Sewer & Water?” Does he sign all the checks or use a stamp? He signs some. “Some? So it's a surprise each week to the employees?” When he was less than forthcoming, Poundstone moved on to his wife: “Do you have a way of rebooting him, ma’am?”
Some of her questions are dumb for the sake of the joke; she knows what vendors are. But some she asks because she genuinely wants to know: What does a guy do who runs a sewer department? As she’s demonstrated on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, common sense and curiosity are her signal strengths, affording her the courage to ask the questions everyone wants to ask but doesn’t. (If only she were the one interrogating Trump’s cabinet nominees.)
An unabashed Democrat, she’s hilarious when it comes to Trumpworld. On Sean Spicer: “Every time he talks, I think his father Gepetto must be worried sick.” On Betsy DeVos: “I realized the other day that the reason I was never seriously considered for Secretary of Education is that I never came out strongly enough against education.” On the Oscars mixup: “Didn’t ya kinda wish that had happened in November?” But she doesn’t confine her barbs to Republicans. She does a spot-on imitation of Hillary’s point-and-wave move (“she was always surprised by the exact same person”); remarks on the similarly startled Nancy Pelosi (“she constantly looks like she’s just been shot in the back”); and cheerfully skewers the mutual self-admiration society of MSNBC anchors.
Her ability to turn circumstances of the moment into instantaneous comic bits is nothing short of wondrous. Finding out that a girl in the front row was 12 years old, she expressed ironic concern about all the foul language in her act (“12? Fuck!”) and kept returning to her every time some ancient pop-cultural reference came up, crouching at the edge of the stage and explaining phenomena like Sally Field in The Flying Nun. (She was also inspired to reflect on her own sixth-grade trauma, when she lost the race for class president and was offered the vice presidency instead — “which I thought was kind of throwing me a bone, because what are the odds of a sixth grader being assassinated?”)
She talked a lot (perhaps too much) about her own children, ages 18 to 26, particularly her teenage son — “an 18-year-old boy is nothing but a penis with no plan.” One of the few lulls in the evening was an exchange between Poundstone and an audience member who liked a parenting book, The Explosive Child, of which the comedian is not a fan. But then she launched into a funny recreation of her son's tantrum in reaction to the book’s “I hear you saying you're upset” methodology (“No fucking shit I'm upset!”) and she had our attention again. As with the Little Drummer Boy bit, in which she imagines an irritable Mary asking Joseph to do something about this kid with the noisy drum so as not to wake up the baby (“I’m not the father!” he replies), she showed a talent for farcical caricature that made you wonder why she hasn’t done more acting on stage or TV.
The Drummer Boy (complete with excellent sheep imitation) was the evening’s capper, following several almost-conclusions — “I said I was going to go and I didn’t. That is soooo like me.” She described her unstoppable talking as an obsessive compulsive disorder: “Even if you weren’t here, I would still be doing this.”
But we were there, and glad of it. At this bizarre juncture in history, Paula Poundstone’s indignant, incredulous comic voice is pretty much the ideal companion.
This article appears in Mar 9-16, 2017.