WASHINGTON — Can you believe it? Election Day is less than 24 hours away.
And after a long, heated, unconventional campaign, many folks are ready for this race to be over.
If laughter is the best medicine, check out Paula Poundstone at The Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, from Friday to Sunday, three chances to see one of Comedy Central’s Top 100 Stand-Ups of All Time.
“I feel like the entire country is now like Rosemary in ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’ … We just want to get it out,” Poundstone joked with WTOP. “It’s such a horrible, awful process. The whole thing reflects badly on all of us. The candidates are from some sort of macabre version of ‘Alice in Wonderland.'”
She says past candidates’ fatal errors seem trite compared to this year’s lewd tapes and FBI probes.
“I just keep picturing Mike Dukakis and Howard Dean drinking together,” Poundstone said. “Dukakis says, ‘I had an ill-fitting helmet.’ Howard Dean says, ‘I said woo.’ That took him out of the race!”
Long before Dean’s roar was immortalized by Dave Chappelle, Poundstone dabbled in politics herself.
“When I was in sixth grade, I ran for class president,” Poundstone said. “School politics are a great idea to teach kids about our democracy. … Me and some other kids claimed that if they elected us president … we would get a soda machine in the school. The teacher took us aside afterward and said, ‘Well, you can’t say that because that’s not true,’ which in no way prepared me for adult politics.”
While there will be political humor at The Birchmere, Poundstone insists her show is for everyone.
“I don’t tell people what to think,” she said. “I don’t tell people how to vote, and if I did, what a strange voter that they would listen! … I just happen to have the microphone so it’s my turn to talk. … I can guarantee you somewhere in the evening we will find common ground, because I’m not a political analyst. I wouldn’t even call myself a political comic so much as my act is largely autobiographical.”
Born in Alabama in 1959, Poundstone grew up bussing tables at an IHOP in Boston.
“I had always wanted to be a comic, but I had absolutely no idea where the mouth of the trail was,” she said. “Fortunately in 1979, when I was bussing tables at a salad bar in Boston, a couple of guys started up a fledgling comedy scene … where a club had an [open mic] night where anybody can go up for five minutes. That’s how you begin. That’s college for a stand-up comic. Lots and lots and lots of it.”
Before long, Poundstone began pounding the pavement by taking her act on the road.
“I took a Greyhound bus around the country to see what clubs were like in different cities and ended up in San Francisco,” Poundstone said. “I never went back to live in Massachusetts. … I miss it a lot.”
While in San Francisco, she was discovered by the late great Robin Williams.
“He was a big supporter of mine,” she said. “Robin was the most generous man I’ve ever known. Truth be told, nobody in my generation or younger would be doing stand-up comedy at all if it weren’t for Robin. … [He] was the guy who renewed audiences’ interest in stand-up comedy, starting in the late ’70s. … Audiences came out really hoping to see Robin, and in the meantime, they saw the rest of us.”
In addition to Williams, she also credits Dana Carvey for her early exposure.
“Dana was managed by the same company Robin was at that time and they introduced me to their management,” she said. “The rest will be in the Paula Poundstone museum. Cities are making bids.”
In 1989, she won the American Comedy Award for Best Female Stand-Up Comic. In 1990, she became the first woman to win the CableACE Award for Best Stand-up Comedy Special for her HBO special “Cats, Cops and Stuff.” And in 1992, she became a household name on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show,” doing backstage reports from the presidential conventions of George Bush and Bill Clinton.
“It was exciting and fun,” she said. “The Democrats were in New York and the Republicans were in Houston. It was so successful that they had me go to the inauguration as well. … I knew very, very little about politics. I don’t know that I’d ever watched more than a few minutes of a convention ever and that’s part of the reason it worked. I was genuinely mystified by what I saw, by what theater it is.”
Since then, she’s joined Joan Rivers and Caroline Rhea on BRAVO’s “Funny Girls” (2006), voiced one of The Forgetters in Pixar’s animated gem “Inside Out” (2015) and released the double-disc album “North By Northwest: Paula Poundstone Live,” which debuted at No. 1 on Amazon back in June.
She’s also a regular rotating guest on NPR’s humorous quiz show “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!,” where host Peter Sagal quizzes a panel about current events from the most recent week of news.
“It’s so much fun,” Poundstone said. “One of the beauties of ‘Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!’ is that nobody has a big ego about who came up with what joke. We’re all there hoping to make the evening entertaining. So when one person throws out a joke, everybody sort of piles onto it. It really is fun!”
Between it all, she still finds time to do nearly 100 live stand-up dates a year.
“I do about 90 a year, which is a lot in my business,” she said. “One of my favorite nights was years ago at The Birchmere. To my left of the stage, there were these two guys and I just began talking to them. One worked in the patent office, so I was finally able to find out why so many patents were pending.”
Why does she keep touring after all these years?
“My job is really a healing, joyful job,” she said. “I consider myself a proud member of the Endorphin Production Industry. … Being in a group of people laughing is really a mentally healthy thing to do.”
God knows after this election, we need it.
Click here for more information. Listen to the full conversation with Paula Poundstone below:
