Cats, Trump and Stuff

Legendary comedian Paula Poundstone heads to The Tin Pan for one night only.

Writer’s note: This Style interview with Paula Poundstone took place on June 4, a day before President Donald Trump’s falling out with Elon Musk became public and two days before protests of Immigration and Customs Enforcement began in Los Angeles.

 

Not everyone can claim that Robin Williams helped their career, but Paula Poundstone can.

The fast and furry comic gave Poundstone a major boost when he asked her to perform stand-up on a 1984 episode of “Saturday Night Live” that he was hosting. Since then, Poundstone has been a fixture in comedy, filming stand-up specials, appearing on late-night shows, hosting the podcast “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone,” and serving as a recurring guest on NPR’s news quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” and the now defunct radio variety show “A Prairie Home Companion.”

On June 20, Poundstone will play The Tin Pan dressed in her iconic wardrobe that falls somewhere between zoot suit and Tom Wolfe. In advance of her performance, Style’s Rich Griset — who is currently studying in South Africa — interviewed Poundstone by Zoom to discuss pets, having faulty memories and Qatar’s recent gift of a $400 million jet to President Donald Trump. This interview has been edited for length and clarity:

Style: Hello!

Paula Poundstone: Hey, how’s it going? What are you doing there?

I’m in grad school.

Oh, wow!

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Cape Town, but it’s an amazing place.

Oh, no, never. I’m not a big world traveler. Too many pets. They’re kind of an anchor — you don’t get to go very far.

Where in the world am I catching you today?

I’m in Santa Monica, California, where I dwell.

How many pets do you have at this point?

I have nine cats and a dog right now. My census is down. I usually have two dogs. I usually have double-digit cats, but, you know, they don’t live forever.

What the highest number of pets you’ve had?

I had 16 cats at one point. Sixteen cats, two dogs, a lizard and a few bunnies. Things have settled down a little bit. Maybe I’ll travel now. It’s so expensive. Before Trump’s reelection [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren had spoken about the price of veterinary care. I’d never heard anybody in Congress bring that up before. It’s outrageous. I was talking to the guy who runs the animal shelter in Santa Monica the other day. I was saying, a couple of years ago, my dog Moe had surgery for her CCL [cranial cruciate ligament]— on a person it’s [called] the ACL [anterior cruciate ligament]. It was $6,000 for the surgery. That’s not including the follow-up appointments or the medications. I said this to him with outrage and he goes, “You know what, it’s double that now.”

That’s crazy. But then Trump got re-elected and I don’t think Elizabeth Warren has mentioned veterinary care yet. Since, you know, everything’s falling apart around us. That sort of fell lower on the priority scale. Now, my pets just have to be careful. I can’t afford any surgeries like that.

I know you’ve spoken at length about the current administration. You did political commentary for Jay Leno. You’ve not shied away from politics, but it does feel like this is a different era. As a comedian, how do you process that? How do you make fun of an administration that is so ridiculous? 

Well, there are lots of jokes. There’s an unending supply of jokes from the Trump administration. I don’t consider myself a political comic so much as I consider myself a voter who thinks about these things. It’s certainly not my area of expertise. Actually, you know what? You know how Harvard is offering a free class on the Constitution? I’m taking that. But yeah, I’m not an expert on how the government works. The jokes fall like apples from an overburdened tree. All you gotta do is stand underneath with a basket and catch them. You don’t even have to craft anything all that carefully.

Years ago, I would say from the time of the golden escalator [when Trump announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential race at Trump Tower], I feel like the audience started to shift. In the beginning, it was just this sort of very defensive kind of response from certain audience members in a way that had never been before. You could make Bush jokes, you could make Reagan jokes, but along came Trump. And I think it’s because there is this part of people that know that what they’re doing is wrong. So, the jokes didn’t land the same way in the beginning. There were some audience members that were very defensive about the whole Trump thing.

I went through a little phase there for a while where I was almost apologetic for the Trump jokes that I made. That was years ago. Now I feel like it is not the time for cowardice. I feel like it is important to speak up, and so I do.

Comedian Paula Poundstone says her podcast “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone” is a big focus of her time these days.

Interesting. I don’t work in comedy, but in my peripheral understanding it seems like there’s been a lot more talk in comedy circles about woke-ism or the importance of “punching up” than the idea that Trump fans can’t take a joke.

Oh no, they can’t stand being made fun of. No question in my mind. I’ve never had a lot of Trump fans in my audience to begin with, because I would not be the cup of tea for those kinds of people. But I had some for a while. Before Trump became the issue, in my audience, the minority were Republican voters, but they were there, and they enjoyed the shows, and we had a great time.

Hey, I’m an atheist, and about every 10 shows or so, when I [ask audience members what they do for a living], it’s somebody from the clergy. I’m not speaking to people who are just like me. Thank goodness, because how boring. But this Trump thing is a horse of a different color, and it has been in almost every way since the start. I’ll be damn glad when it’s over. I don’t know that it will be even in my lifetime, but it’s a good direction to head in.

How would you compare the second Trump administration to the first? What do you see as the same? What do you see as different?

Well, this one is obviously more unbridled. This one they have Project 2025. They really went into it already. Having a plan for ways to dismantle the system and fairness, you know, seems to be working pretty well for them. The first time around they didn’t have that goofy, silly, stupid plan. Basically, it’s a white supremacist plan. Boy, am I not enjoying it.

It’s been really interesting watching the news from abroad and getting another country’s take on American news. I don’t know if you followed the meeting of the South African president with Donald Trump, but the South African president joked, “I’m sorry I don’t have a plane to offer you.” And Donald Trump said, “I wish you did.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The South African president meant it as a joke. I’m not sure that Trump did. It’s been said a thousand times, but if you were writing this as a movie they’d go ‘No, c’mon, that’s a little unbelievable.” But there it is.

You’re a frequent panelist on “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” which plays off the news. Have there been any changes to their approach on the news and making if funny? This is not, I don’t know, the “scandal” of Obama wearing a tan suit. This is such a different context for trying to make comedy out of the news.

Yeah! They’ve always tried to strike a balance. One of the things that Trump does very effectively — and he’s probably done it since he was nonverbal — is get attention. A lot of the things he does and says are to get him attention. It would be easy for “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” to get swallowed up in Trump all the time. … I think [the show] is careful to avoid falling for that trick.

I watched your recent appearance on Colbert. You talk a bit about your memory as you get older. It made me think of an old bit of yours about the movie “Hoosiers” and how even though you’ve seen it a million times, you’re still wondering if the basketball team will win or not. I feel like my memory is going as I get older. Has this changed your enjoyment of things, enjoying movies you’ve seen before by not remembering how they end?

By the way, I don’t think it’s an age thing. I mean, is my memory getting better as I get older? No. But I have, for many years, had trouble with my memory. What I find is it’s stress related. … I’ve done a joke in my act for years about my kids telling me that I was driving past our house. And I would say to them, “Who the hell are you and what are you doing in my car?”

[Laughs] Aside from the tour, what other projects do you have in the hopper?

Because I’m a human being I have a podcast and that is a big focus of my time and energy. It’s called “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone,” and it stays afloat in a marketplace of literally millions of podcasts, so that’s an achievement right there.

Broadly speaking, what has changed in comedy over the course of your career?

I’m kind of isolated because I mercifully got out of clubs about 30 years ago. I work theaters, I work by myself, I don’t have an opening act.

I started in ’79 with open mic nights. Started in Boston and then I went to San Francisco. Open mic nights were the hottest nights of the week [at comedy clubs], the premise being that anybody who wants to can go on for five minutes. And audiences were so excited. It’s not like stand-up comedy was new for heaven’s sakes, but it was certainly having a renaissance. Audiences were excited to see comics that might be good or might be bad or get in on the ground floor with somebody new.

Now I’m told that when somebody does an open mic night — I don’t even think they call them open mic — they call them “bringers.” Meaning that in order to go on you have to bring with you a certain amount of audience members. Boy, I couldn’t do that. I’m so glad I’m not a part of that. You know, the idea being that the person has to invite their friends to come. I don’t have friends that would come see me do five minutes. And, by the way, I never did.

But I’ll tell you, I do miss when I was younger, say 30 years ago and before. I would go on the road to comedy clubs around the country and those jobs would be four or five nights a week. You’d be in one place, you know, one club for four or five nights. And then on Sunday or Monday, you flew home. On those nights, as soon as I got home, I would be hanging out, if not performing, at the Improv in Hollywood. Everybody was there. It was so much fun. I sure miss that feeling of brethren from back then.

Who were some of the other comics from that group?

There was Seinfeld and Richard Lewis and Dana Carvey and Robin Williams and Dennis Miller. There was a great guy named Johnny Dark. There was the dining room and the showroom, and the way the club was set up you went in through the dining room. … There were nights where I never went into the showroom. I was just hanging out in the dining room all night. … There was a table in there called the Round Table, because, guess what, it was round. And I sat there with another friend of mine on many, many nights. People were so funny sitting at that Round Table. I laughed harder in the dining room than I ever did in the showroom. You’d tell stories from being on the road, mostly.

Michael J. Fox used to come in. Clarence Williams, who played Lincoln on “The Mod Squad,” used to hang out there. I met Albert Brooks there. John Goodman used to hang out there. Dick Shawn, who was Hitler in “Springtime for Hitler” in the original “Producers” used to hang out there. It was just the hottest place. I wasn’t there to be seen. I was there to eat chocolate cake and laugh, but if you wanted to be seen, that was the place to do it.

Well, I think that’s a great moment to leave things on. Paula, thank you so much for your time. Break a leg at The Tin Pan and on the rest of your tour.

All right, thanks so much. Good luck.

Paula Poundstone plays Friday, June 20 at The Tin Pan, 8982 Quioccasin Road. For more information visit tinpanrva.com.

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