Paula Poundstone: When I first started out I did open mic nights in Boston. I was bussing tables for a living so it wasn't like I turned my back on a law career but the premise of the open mic night was that anybody that wanted to could go on and do five minutes and the guys that sort of ignited the standup comedy scene in Boston at that time, it was sort of.. this would've been '79 so you know the '80s were really popular years of standup comedy and this was like right when the spark had began to you know, kind of catch fuel and so most.. Everybody who was trying to be a standup at that time we were all broke and the audience that came to see us oftentimes was sort of, of the same economic strata.
I don't even think there was a cover charge for those shows and if there was it was a buck. You know, the bar made the money off the drinks and so the rooms... and they weren't big rooms either. So the rooms would be packed... packed with really hot crowds and you know, the idea as an audience member is you're gonna go and you're gonna see some people who really. You know, you're gonna get on the ground floor of some people that are gonna go on probably to be you know, terrific comics and there's other people that are just terrible. So because the crowds were so hot and because this idea had sort of caught on there were tons of us waiting to go on.
The shows would go from like you know eight o'clock, 'til two in the morning or you know one thirty or whatever it was. So people were very touchy about that five minutes. If you went over that five minutes you could hear them sharpening the knives in the back. So I would prepare my five minutes. I would have to just type it up in my rooming house and sort of the best I could time what five minutes was and I would spend all week memorizing my five minutes when I was bussing tables, you could see my lips moving.. And then I would go on.
Now to this day I am not a good memorizer and I still have lots of anxiety. I find it so frustrating... lots of nerves over performing in certain places. So back then I was just a basket of nerves. So as I would walk up to the stage nine times out of ten, something would distract me. I would see something that made me think of other things and I would sometimes go on stage and I would make a comment about whatever it was I just saw.
Well now I had no idea where I was in the five minutes because I had already taken up I don't know how much time talking about whatever I just talked about. So now when I start to do my five minutes the whole time I'm thinking, "Oh my God, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know where I am." It took... and I kept feeling like, "Oh my gosh, this thing where I can't focus and I don't say the set is so unprofessional and so terrible, it's such a bad thing."
It took me years to figure out that that's where the joy of the night was. To say the thing about somebody you just saw on your way up or if you know somebody spills a drink or you know to go off and make those comments, in the very beginning I thought that that was my error, that I wasn't self disciplined enough. When I finally realized... 'cause sometimes when I'd go back to the material part it wouldn't come off very funny... probably because it seemed so stayed but when I finally allowed myself to be myself, when I said, "You know what, I can't memorize to save my life. I'm just gonna allow myself to say whatever I wanna say," things really changed.
Paula Poundstone riff on aging
I gave myself permission to be who I am which is a person who A, talks a tremendous amount, B, I can't... I have OCD and I didn't know that back then but one of the ways it manifests itself in me is that everything that gets said reminds me of some other thing that I feel that I must say. So my conversations are not very linear, I tell people now I fly fish in the stream of consciousness. In the past what I would do is I would try so hard to stick what I... to what I meant to say, that as these other ideas sort of knocked at my door I was distracted by the knocking but I wouldn't let them in. And finally I went, "You know what, I'm just gonna say whatever." I cut myself off occasionally and say a different thing than I started out to say. I'm gonna.. you know when somebody.. If something strikes me as funny that happened on this side of the room I'm gonna say it. So a lot of it was yeah, just getting comfortable enough that I could just be who I am and some of that by the way required failing.
Paula Poundstone riff
I have a couple of goals for any given night. I always tell people that my goal is for each audience member to at least for a moment, at least once, fear incontinence. But on a more highfalutin level, what I would really like is for people to go away feeling a sense of connection that lifts them up which you know can be done in a variety of ways. Obviously here I'm using the tool of you know the laughter; but ultimately, there's other things I could do on stage that I think would be funny or that I think people would laugh at but wouldn't fulfill that idea of that sense of connection.
Poundstone Riff
With my, quote, unquote, act, I often think of stuff, you know, during my day. The other day I heard an ad on the radio for some show and they said, you know, they said, "Well, this show is gonna sell out so you wanna get your tickets fast." And I'm always amused by that when they do that on the radio and I go, "Well, if it's gonna sell out then why are they bothering even promoting it," right. Clearly they don't think it is gonna sell out or no one would be paying for that advertising time.
So I was sort of noodling around with that idea in my head because I heard that ad and I've thought that many times. So I grab my notebook for my job and I just wrote, "Sell out," down on a piece of paper and when I go on stage this weekend, I will before I go on stage, I'll take out my notebook and I will glance at that.. just at, "Sell out," and then I'll go on stage and I'll talk about a thousand things, talk to the audience members, ask people where they're from, what they do for a living and all those things and at some point in the night if my memory holds out I will toss out just that idea about you know, "Why do they do that thing where they say the thing's gonna sell out and what kind of audience members are they afraid might show up if they don't plead to this particular radio audience." I'll throw that out and if people sort of chuckle, right when I first say it, just maybe a chuckle of recognition, then I'll push forward with it. If they don't, then I'll stop. You know I might come back and say, "Boy that sell out thing is just... I don't know, people just don't think that's funny." Now I'll leave that piece of paper in that notebook for quite a while and I'll try it again another night and I'll try it again another night. If I find repeatedly that people don't like that sell out thing, then I might not touch it again for a long, long time. I don't generally throw it out altogether.
I had one piece in my book for years, it was about a Snickers commercial where supposedly they were interviewing real-life people in this Snickers commercial and they would catch someone you know during their day and one of 'em in particular was this girl and she was brushing a horse and the interviewer supposedly comes up to her and says you know, "When do you enjoy a Snickers bar?" And she said, "Along about noon when your appetite is poking at you, poking at you." And as she says that she takes the horse brush and she sort of pokes it out into the air so, you know, to you know gesticulate what she's saying.
You know, "It's just a stupid commercial," but I said, you know, I know how those commercials are made and that means that even in order to come up with this thing that's really dumb, there were writers, there were meetings, there were scripts that were worse than that that got tossed out. So I used to do this thing about this Snickers bar commercial. I tried it a couple times and it went nowhere. I don't know, people just weren't having it and then one night, I don't know why I bothered doing it again, I did it on an HBO special. I don't know why I chose to do it on that HBO special but prior to that I don't think it really had ever gone over very well. Something reminded me of it and so I tried it again.
Poundstone Snicker Riff
To this day, people come up to me and they say, "Oh, you do the poking at you thing," or they go... or they'll say, "Will you sign this thing for my boyfriend and will you just throw in the poking at you thing when you sign the thing?" So, who knows?
I think that we need each other desperately and that means even people you don't think you like. I want what is the same about us that laugh of recognition, that thing that is the same about us to rule the day, to be the thing that bridges. I talk a lot about my 16-year-old son on stage these days because he is kicking my ass.
He is the love of my life and the bane of my existence. I couldn't have imagined when I was a kid how hard raising children might be and sometimes that is the loneliest feeling in the world. One that brings such a feeling of hopelessness and like, "I'm such a loser," and I've gone on stage and I guess I stumbled on this really accidentally, I didn't do it on purpose but you know I've gone on stage and talked about him. I feel a little bit bad from throwing him under the bus but it's not so much about him it's about my struggle to raise him and my inadequacies as a parent and I cannot tell you how many people have come up to me and said, "Oh my God, you're raising our son," or, "Oh my gosh, your son is a perfect match for our daughter."
The truth is, no matter who you are, biology does a thing to your kid sometimes and does a thing to you too and so to have that shared experience, right, to be able to spend a night laughing about that is... I mean for me it's been this incredibly healing and helpful thing just to not feel like I'm the only one. Just to go, "Oh yeah, this is what happens," you know. And sometimes when I deal with my son I can sort of carry that feeling over and go, "Oh yeah... boy, we are so much like so many others."
Poundstone Riff
Generally speaking, the audience laughter works a little bit like a bumper in bowling. It puts you back on the track. However, there could be an unintended consequence of using that as your sort of sole measure. It's a little bit I suppose like an elected official. When people campaign they have these two ideas that clash a lot of times. You know, they'll make this argument sometimes that they're there to do the will of the people, right. That they were elected because they're supposed to represent these people and they have to do what the people say and then there's this other argument that, "I don't live by polls. You know, I don't look at polls... you know, leadership means taking that strong stand even when everyone else thinks you're wrong."
And there's a little bit of that in standup or in any kind of art sometimes I think. Sometimes you sort of slowly nudge people over to something that they didn't know they liked, and that's what makes for a creative and interesting voice as opposed to repackaging the same thing that everyone else has always done. So if I lived solely by you know what the audience said, "Yeah, do more of that too," I don't know that I would be interesting.
