Love criminals, Robin Williams, and Inside Out, what Paula Poundstone has to say

As a comedian, author, actress, commentator, podcast host and owner of seven cats, Paula Poundstone has worn many hats over her 45-year career.

Kids may remember her role as Forgetter Paula in Pixar’s Inside Out, while their parents’ first introduction to Poundstone may have been through her educational ad bumper series for PBS in the mid-late 90s, “Another Pointer from Paula Poundstone.”

Today, Poundstone is a regular on NPR’s Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me! and hosts her own podcast, Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone, while still regularly hitting the road to perform across the country. She’ll be at Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium on March 29.

The work hasn’t grown stale after over four decades on the road, and neither has Poundstone’s wit.

"I started my job 45 years ago, and I've been on the road to make a living probably for 43 of those years," Poundstone said. "I used to have a small shampoo collection, but I gave it up."

Leading up to her stop in Spartanburg, Poundstone reflected on the dual coast beginning to her comedy career, the unique challenges of comedy across mediums, and her sixth year of podcasting.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What can people expect from the show Friday?

I talk about taking care of a house full of animals. I talk about trying to pay attention to the news well enough to cast a halfway decent vote. I tell stories about where I'm from and growing up. But my favorite part of the show is just talking to the audience. I do that time-honored, 'Where are you from? What do you do for a living?,' and in this way, little biographies of audience members emerge, and I use that from which to set my sails. So no two shows are ever the same.

Somewhere in my head, I have 45 years of material rattling around. I always say to people, I think the inside of my head looks like one of those arcade games where you step inside a booth and they blow money around you and whatever you can grab you can take. That's pretty much how the inside of my head is while I'm on stage. If I think of something to say, I blurt it out.

Do any of your past shows stand out in your mind?

I did a show in Chicago one time, in a club, and there was a couple that was sitting right up near the stage, and they just kept making out in the middle of the show. It was really awkward. It was awful. I tried talking with them; they wouldn't stop. So — I think this was the only time in my 45-year career I ever did this — I had them thrown out. You just couldn't get past it, and it was just so out of place. For the rest of the show, I kept referring to them as the love criminals.

And years later people will come up and say, 'I was there in Chicago when you had the love criminals.' That I remember, but now after all these years, it has to have been a pretty extraordinary thing to remember.

What was comedy like when you were first getting started?

I started in Boston, and Boston had, to some degree, its own personality of comics. I started in ’79.

The audiences that used to come to the shows all had this common sense of humor, so comics in Boston all kind of drifted in that same direction, in terms of their senses of humor. [It was an] incredibly sexist, really, a very, sort of, misogynistic sense of humor. So, it was a hard place to start out as a woman ... It was pretty rough and tumble.

I was a part of that group really for about a year before I took a Greyhound bus around the country to see what clubs are like in different cities and ended up in San Francisco where I just fell in love with the audience.

How did you find the confidence to do that?

I was 19 or 20; I can't even remember anymore. I have no idea. I think, to some degree, just naïveté was what allowed me to do that. It wasn't so much courage. It just didn't occur to me that something bad could happen. And I also had a very strong desire to get to clubs in different cities and see what it was like there.

It was very adventurous, as I look back, but really great to meet comics in other cities.

What was your early career in San Francisco like? Who’s the coolest person you met?

San Francisco had a great open mic circuit and many of the comics that were there were not from San Francisco. They had come there to be a part of the stand-up comedy scene.

But Robin Williams was from San Francisco, and he was already a big star by this time. He was doing Mork & Mindy. But when he wasn’t in LA doing big star stuff, he would come hang around with us regular old comics in San Francisco and hence we became friends.

It also created an audience for San Francisco comics because Robin was such a huge star. He would walk into a room, and it's as if people couldn't stop staring at him. He'd come to a club, and it didn't matter who was on stage. Everyone kind of deferred to him. It could have been your big Saturday night headline performance and now Robin walks into the room and you'd go, ‘Okay, listen, thank you. I’m going to step away now, and here’s Robin Williams!’ You couldn’t not because all of the energy of the room went towards him, whether he intended it or not, and I don't think he did. It's the nature of the beast when you're that big of a star.

But what would happen is, audiences came out in San Francisco hoping that Robin Williams would stop by, and while people were waiting for Robin Williams to stop by, they found that they liked some of the rest of us too. I've always said this, but any comic of my age or younger, owes a debt of gratitude to Robin Williams because he also did it all around the country.

You're coming up on 300 episodes of your podcast, what have been some of your favorite conversations?

We had a plumber and just talked about plumbing. We mostly have on people that have real information to share, stuff that you could use in your daily life. For example, I had no idea that Kleenex weren't good for the pipes. I thought it was the same as toilet paper. It's not. I had no idea that if you pour warm water down your sink drain or your toilet, maybe monthly, it can help it not get clogged. And I gotta tell you, I have to call the plumber far less than I ever did before, just because of those two pieces of information.

Occasionally, we've had on actors. We call it "Outside the Actors Studio" and the premise is that they are helping me learn how to audition. I'll write a scene for us to use as the audition scene, and then we'll do this reading of the scene that I wrote.

A few years back, I wrote one for Betsy Brandt, who was Marie in Breaking Bad, and she's chillingly good as Marie and really funny. But I wrote this scene where she and I were cops, and she was a rookie cop. I had this idea that she gets in the car with me, and I'm the seasoned, just about to retire cop. And I wrote this line — "Oh, I can't wait to shoot someone." And then the idea is that she would see the look on my face and go — "Legally, legally." And I type it up and give her this and the way I imagined her doing it was exactly how she did it. She did it so funny. That was a thrilling moment for me.

You have another movie coming out this summer, Inside Out 2. What was it like working on that?

Delightful! I am the teeniest, tiny part of Inside Out, and I reprised my teeny tiny part in Inside Out 2. It was delightful both times, and I'm so excited to be a part of a Pixar movie because they're just top-notch.

If you had one piece of advice to give to people, what would it be?

Avoid your own drama. I tell that to young people, you know those horrible dramatic years? Try to skip that as much as you can. Just do the next thing and the next thing; don't worry about the dramatic part.

If you go …

Paula Poundstone will be at Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium at 7 p.m. on March 29. Tickets are on sale on Ticketmaster or at the box office from 9 a.m.-3 p.m. through Friday.

Samantha Swann covers city news, development and culture in Spartanburg. She is a University of South Carolina Upstate and Greenville Technical College alumna. Contact her at sswann@shj.com or on Instagram at @sam_on_spartanburg.

This article originally appeared on Herald-Journal: Comic Paula Poundstone to perform at Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium