Julia Weber
Staff Writer
Reporter’s Note: This recap of Paula Poundstone’s lecture will not, by any means, be as funny as Paula Poundstone’s lecture. Nor will it contain as many expletives.
Comedian Paula Poundstone delivered the morning lecture at 10:45 a.m. Thursday in the Amphitheater which entailed a stand-up routine followed by a conversation with National Comedy Center Executive Director Journey Gunderson. Poundstone was the penultimate act for the Chautauqua Lecture Series Week Two theme “Comedy Now: A Week Curated with Lewis Black.”
Poundstone has multiple comedy specials and is a panelist on NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” She serves on the National Comedy Center’s advisory board and hosts a weekly podcast “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.”
During her comedy set, Poundstone covered an array of topics including connecting flights, her interview with The Chautauquan Daily, U.S. politics and musical instruments.
Poundstone began by recounting her travels to the Institution, which notably included her flight into Cleveland.
“I flew into Cleveland because that makes all the sense of the world,” she said. “I flew into Cleveland. Apparently, they have a program now where they just pick cities where you’re forced to fly to sort of cheer them up.”
Her journey to Chautauqua wasn’t finished yet.
“I was driven — I don’t know — two-and-a-half hours and by the time I arrived, it was dark and it was like going through a fish tank. Big vehicle, little teeny streets and a lot of pedestrians that would sort of scatter, and then they would go through the little castle that’s in the fish tank,” she said.
Poundstone said that she felt she lost many of her social skills during the COVID-19 pandemic and wondered if others felt this way, but said fellow comedian Lewis Black had told her the audience at Chautauqua is “aggressively polite.”
Shifting the conversation to national politics, Poundstone said she felt let down by politicians and explained that the political anxiety she experiences weighs on her for most of the day — aside from when she first wakes up in the morning.
“Don’t you just find yourself waking up in the morning, and you’ve got about 15 to 30 seconds where you’ve forgotten?” she asked. “And then it just hits you like a fucking lead balloon, and it’s hard to get out of bed.”
Poundstone shouted out the Daily, mentioning that she had participated in an interview ahead of her lecture and expressed her shock at the Institution maintaining a daily paper in a small community.
“Coming here, I did an interview because you all have a daily fucking paper! Who the hell has a daily paper anymore? That’s crazy,” she said.
She joked that because she likes to talk so much, the audience members at her shows get homesick. Again, she blamed her lost social skills on the stay-at-home orders of the pandemic.
Poundstone observed that many Chautauquans must make a day of the lectures — seat cushions and clear plastic bags in tow — “because you come here, and people say inspirational things, and then you wait for the next person to come say another inspirational thing.”
Returning to the subject of politics, she said, “Don’t you find yourselves — multiple times a day — saying to yourself, ‘What the fuck happened to us?’ ”
The comedian received lengthy applause from the audience in response to her question.
“If it was something that made sense, we would have figured it out a long time ago and stopped,” she said. “It’s got to be outside of the box, it’s something we’re not thinking of.”
Poundstone asked a couple of audience members about their relationship to the Institution, where they live during the off-season and what their careers were. She called on one Chautauquan, a retired nurse practitioner, and, after learning about her occupation, recounted feeling at one point like she could work as a nurse in hospice settings, but later realized it would not be a good fit for her as a career.
“I realized, if I was a hospice worker, we would never hear the dying person’s last words,” she said. “They would say, ‘Tell my estranged husband …’ and I would say, ‘You know, I never got married, and I’ll tell you why …’ ”
She said that this week’s theme is different from typical ones because Chautauquans are typically discussing “the end of the world,” but her talent is to weave together both.
As a member of the National Comedy Center’s advisory board, Poundstone continued her set by telling the audience she would be visiting the center later in the day. She called on an audience member and asked if he frequently visited museums, to which he replied that he did. Most recently, he had been to the Musical Instrument Museum, where he had seen an array of modern and historic instruments.
“What do you want to bet some of them weren’t even a thing?” she asked. “They just left some hollowed out piece of wood. … (It) just got left there, and you were looking at it like, ‘Oh, isn’t that amazing,’ and it turns out it just hadn’t gotten in the trash yet.”
Poundstone asked him about his occupation, to which he replied he is a retired Methodist minister. The two spoke about Easter, and Poundstone said that she believed that Jesus’ body was removed by grave robbers — specifically women, because “the sheet was folded exactly.”
Poundstone ended her stand-up set on a more serious note.
“I’ll tell you what I believe in,” she said. “I believe in you, I do. I believe that we can pull out of the bloody mess we’re in, I really do. I think it’s going to take a lot of things because we’re in a situation — that’s for sure. I think it’s going to take modern instruments; I think people who play the tuba should get the fuck out in the street. I think it’s going to take a kind of Dada philosophy; I think it’s going to take weirdness. I think it’s going to take showing up in the streets every time we’re called to be there — obviously in a non-violent way — but I think we can do it. But we have to love our country, and we have to love one another.”
NCC’s Gunderson joined Poundstone centerstage to move into the conversational portion of the morning lecture, focused more closely on the current role of comedy and Poundstone’s comedic style.
Gunderson recalled the annual Lucille Ball Comedy Festival the year the Jamestown native would have turn 100. Poundstone headlined the festival the day of Ball’s birthday. That day, Aug. 6, 2011, was “the start of the momentum” and the “spark” for establishing the NCC.
Gunderson then asked Poundstone about the role of crowd work — a technique in which a comedian engages with individuals in the audience during live performances — in her comedy and how she developed this relationship with her audience throughout her career.
When starting out in comedy, Poundstone worked at a restaurant, and she would practice and memorize her sets as she waited tables, she said, but when she was onstage, she would forget her material, thereby forcing the improvisational jokes and crowd work, which are now a beloved trait of her humor.
At first, she struggled with this, thinking it was a negative trait that damaged her performances, but she later realized her best material came when she didn’t know what she was going to say next.
Gunderson also asked about Poundstone’s numerous appearances on comedy shows like “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson and “Late Night with David Letterman.”
Poundstone shared an instance in which she had appeared on “The Tonight Show” and, afterward, Carson — dressed in a costume inspired by ZZ Top as part of a comedic bit of his own — came up to congratulate her on a terrific show.
“I felt like such an asshole because I hadn’t watched (ZZ Top’s performance), but I go, ‘You too, you were great.’ The guy looks at me kind of hard, and he goes ‘No, no, it’s me,’ and I have zero idea what he’s talking about,” she said.
But the man in front of her was not ZZ Top.
“I’m staring at him, and he takes off his hat and takes off his beard, and he’s frustrated that he can’t get his mustache off, and somebody rushes over to help him,” she said. “And it was Carson. And he was so flipped out that I didn’t know who he was. I guess if you’ve been Johnny Carson all those years, everyone knows who you are.”
Poundstone recounted stories of her beginnings in comedy after Gunderson asked about her move from Boston to the West. She explained that in order to perform at comedy clubs across the nation, she would buy Greyhound bus passes and travel to clubs, perform, then sleep on the return bus. She also reflected on being the first woman comic to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, explaining that initially she hadn’t wanted to engage with former President George H.W. Bush, but changed her mind when the White House phoned her motel.
“I get (to the motel), and the light is on on my phone, and I call the front desk, and they say. ‘The White House is calling,’ and I call the White House, they say, ‘The President wants to meet with you.’ I could not stash my spine under my bed fast enough,” she said. “I think I took two steps between the White House, I think I just boing-ed there.”
Closing out the conversational portion of the lecture, Gunderson asked about Poundstone’s love for classic comedy shows and if there was a moment in her life in which she realized she could do it, too.
Poundstone said as a young child, she would often be home while her siblings were at school and her mother was in bed. Left to her own devices, she gravitated toward the television. Though she didn’t care for children’s shows, she found comedy shows like “I Love Lucy” and “The Three Stooges.”
“For years, I said that I was raised by them,” she said.
To end the lecture, Poundstone shared an excerpt from a letter her kindergarten teacher wrote explaining Poundstone’s progress during her time in school.
The teacher had written: “I’ve enjoyed many of Paula’s humorous comments about our activities.”
