App Summer Presents Comedienne Paula Poundstone July 17

Story by Anna Oakes

“Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” personality and renowned standup comic Paula Poundstone comes to Farthing Auditorium for a performance on Friday, July 17, at 8:00 p.m.

Everyone wishes they had that quick-on-your-feet, spontaneous ability to find the humor in everyday situations and make others laugh. Comedienne Paula Poundstone has that gift, and she took it and ran with it, making a career out of her off-the-cuff, hilarious interactions with live audiences.

On Friday, July 17, Poundstone visits Boone for the first time as part of An Appalachian Summer Festival, performing at 8:00 p.m. at Farthing Auditorium. Tickets are $25 for adults, $15 for ASU students, $16 for students ages 6 to 18 and $10 for kids 12 & under. The performance is a SkyBest Mainstage Series event on the Schaefer Popular Series.

Poundstone has starred in several HBO comedy specials, appeared on Saturday Night Live, hosted her own show on ABC, appeared on numerous radio and television shows and is a frequent panelist on the weekly NPR radio show “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me.”

By the age of 19, Poundstone was traveling the country in a Greyhound bus and dropping in at comedy club open mic nights wherever she visited. In 1979, she began honing her skills in the Boston area, where heckling thrives. It’s here that she developed her signature comedic style of spontaneous, improvised interaction with the crowd.

“When I was first starting out at open mic nights in Boston, I had five minutes of material written, [and] I would get so nervous that I forgot my five minutes,” Poundstone said in a phone interview. “So I was stuck having to just talk to people.” The budding comedienne would start a conversation with the person sitting directly in front of her or respond to a shouter from the back of the club. Sometimes this would cause her to run over her allotted five minutes, irritating comics waiting behind her.

“Originally, I thought that that was the wrong thing to do,” Poundstone said, “but somewhere along the way I figured out that it was really the good part.”

The audience interaction is the driving force behind Poundstone’s routines, making each performance unique from the one before it. While scrolling through a “Rolodex” of material in her head, she learns about the crowd by asking audience members questions.

“I sort of grab people,” she said. “They’re like little interviews.” Poundstone said she learns a lot about a community from audience members’ responses and from the rest of the crowd’s reaction to what is said.

Sales of Paula Poundstone’s book There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant To Say will benefit the ASU University Library. Poundstone is a national spokesperson for Friends of Libraries USA.

Of course, years of unplanned, spur-of-the-moment communication with strangers have not been without awkward and uncomfortable moments. One of the more memorable of these came during Poundstone’s first hour-long HBO special, “Cats, Cops and Stuff,” in 1990. When HBO hired Poundstone to do the special, they told her she couldn’t talk to the audience. Recording technology wasn’t as good then as it is now, she noted.

“HBO said, ‘That’s fine for night clubs, but that’s not going to work in television,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s a big part of what I do.” Poundstone finally talked HBO into letting her engage the audience, and the production team rehearsed running out to random points in the auditorium to quickly microphone the crowd members the comedienne singled out. On the night of the show, the subject of lawyers came up, and one lady let out a very audible groan. After Poundstone’s prodding, the woman revealed that she had had a bad experience with lawyers when her mother had an accident. She was reluctant to describe the incident in further detail, but a relentless Poundstone “pushed her and pushed her and pushed her” to elaborate. The woman did, explaining to Poundstone, the rest of the audience and HBO viewers that her mother had fallen at a car garage and had her face “torn off” by a lube rack!

“It was such a horrendous, disgusting thing, and I had made the lady say it,” Poundstone remembered. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, the HBO people are going to kill me!’”

But it didn’t take long for the audience’s groans to evolve into nervous laughter, and as she always does, Poundstone ran with it. Even the lube rack victim’s daughter was cackling.

“Somehow there was something about how horrible it was that struck everyone as funny,” she said. “Luckily, it got funny. It could have just been the end of the night.”

That HBO special earned Poundstone the first of two career Cable ACE Awards and made her the first woman to receive the award for standup comedy special. She is also the first woman to perform at the White House Correspondents Dinner and won an Emmy for her field pieces on PBS’ “Life & Times” program.

Poundstone lives in southern California, where she raises her three children. She’s also active on the web, squandering much of her free time on Facebook and Twitter.

“Writing something in 140 characters—it’s almost cruel,” she said. “It’s very hard, for me anyway, to express anything in 140 characters, but I manage.”

An avid reader, Poundstone was recently named the national spokesperson for Friends of Libraries USA, a group that raises money for local libraries. Following her July 17 performance at Farthing Auditorium, she will sign copies of her 2007 book, There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant To Say, which she will sell to benefit ASU’s University Library.

For tickets or more information, call 828-262-4046 or click to www.appsummer.org.

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