InnerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse Classic: Paula Poundstone

you she dropped out of high school to follow her dreams working her way through comedy clubs and assorted odd jobs while waiting to hit the big time and it all paid off an American comedy award for best female stand-up comic and her name on Comedy Central's list of the 100 greatest stand-ups of all time she's been seen on The Tonight Show has headlined multiple award-winning cable TV specials and as a panelist on the hit National Public Radio quiz show wait wait don't tell me hello i'm ernie manouse on this interviews classic we take you back to 2010 for my interview with the always entertaining and humorous award-winning comic Paula Poundstone um well my crowds have been a little bit older I don't know how that happened you know I don't really know exactly because the truth is I don't watch other people very much and my own crowd really has been there there were people who came up to me last night in in Houston that said I saw you you know in San Francisco in the early eighties person who came up last night said I saw you the first time you were on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson so a lot of my crowd has kind of you know been with me forever I'm told that it's a little more rough and tumble like in the clubs I was lucky because I started in I think it was June of 1979 and it was the very very beginning of what my brethren and I referred to as the comedy Renaissance when people which sort of became interested again in that in that form of entertainment and so you know I worked through some really fun years of audience you know where they would just they were just go with anything you said you didn't even have to be funny in fact there were a lot of guys who frankly were just awful that's hard to say whether I was or not but I worked with guys that were just terrible now you know big producers writers big stars phenomenon I think we've all sat in a club or seen a comedian you're like they're not funny but the crowds going so what is the magic of getting that crowd to respond if the material isn't there I'm not sure the delivery and my feeling is that the whole thing regardless of what words I say the whole thing is my relationship with the audience and once you've established that you really can kind of you know say new stuff that you know people tell me stuff I used to say or that they've heard me say before and I'm like oh boy I had somebody on our crew say to me that they wanted me to ask you they saw your show in Dallas in 88 and they're wondering if you remembered their girlfriend because she had gloves on and yes you do remember that I really felt for Sarah Sarah Palin over the hand thing with writing the things on the hand I gotta tell ya I I don't share her views on many topics but I certainly am sympathetic with it's not not having a view it's just not remembering in the moment what it is yeah look how many people have talked about him but interested I wondered if it wasn't some sort of clever ploy to you know I don't know to kind of wheedle Sarah Palin further into the American consciousness I actually think it was you know one of those kind of nutty smart things that she does let me take you way back true or false that your whole comedy career began in kindergarten well mrs. bump I loved and saw just recently my kindergarten teacher she wrote in the summary letter in May of 1965 I believe it was it was like in Louisville report card the first sentence the last paragraph was I've enjoyed many of Polish numerous comments about our activities so probably I was doing a tight five on Plato we have a pencil box and I remember specifically that mine was a Velveeta cheese box and you put it in you know what they were now referred to as the cubby well I bring that up because I wonder simply somebody writing something like that down and your parents or people around you seeing that knowing it if that starts you on a path I kind of think it does although in the first grade miss Carter wrote that I was prone to emotional outbursts and that my handwriting was very poor the first grade how good is anybody's handwriting after all you are you were holding the pencil that was the size of a tree I was a slight child yeah that one didn't take me as far that comment I think abroad eyes I think it probably does you know I probably should have done a better job telling my children with their cut out when they're a little apparently my oldest daughter was told young age that hurts sitting in a chair and doing nothing was excellent at what point because at the time you were coming up in this business female comics were few and far between so where did you think I could make a living at this this is something I'm sure that I thought necessarily a lot about making a living at it in the very very beginning and I never thought about the the kind of percentage of male female just never I mean no it didn't matter and now it's still unbalanced in terms of the amount of guys doing the amount of women doing it but I would still say it doesn't matter I think it mattered a lot would Phyllis Diller was working I think it mattered a lot when Joan Rivers first started and I think that part of the way they do what they do is was formed by that fact you know they've worked in strip clubs and stuff like that back then there weren't really comedy clubs per se and so you know when you go on after so what do we just strip naked and you're a woman and you're not planning on doing that I do think it puts you in an awkward position you know you know I started when I was 19 I'm even now at 50 I don't think things out that well but at 19 there was you know rode a bus from Massachusetts to California and stopped along the way and worked comedy clubs yes there used to be a thing called the Merritt pass you can buy 450 bucks you go anywhere you wanted for about that yeah and I would do this thing where I had some brethren that had the Boston comics that had gone around the country a little bit and so I knew the names of a handful of places that I might check out and I would take the bus to say Denver for example and when I got to the Denver bus station I would store my stuff in a locker and then I would check the schedule and I was find out a bus that left at night that went for hours away and so I would go I find the nightclub I'd go maybe tell jokes do whatever hook up with some people and then I would come back to the bus station take that bus for hours away sit on the bench to the bus going back to Denver came by savings so when do you hit the point that you realize this could be your career I mean it's a fun journey an adventure but it could be your life I've I haven't committed yet I don't know I mean I wasn't able to well I mean it depends what you call making a living you know before you have kids before you have any responsibilities you know making women is actually fairly easy I didn't really have a huge overhead when I was young so you know maybe a couple years before I before I was able to you know quit my day job as it were I know it's good because I I had some amount of day jobs yeah you know which that it's it's important I think both to be a functional adult and and also just to have I mean if you were just a stand-up comic for your whole life yeah you don't really have anything to say to your audience you know what I mean cuz you got so little in common with them it's just you know yeah I had people watching me and laughing my whole life that doesn't really work also it gives you something to draw on you know I think unless you've waited tables I I don't think you should eat in a restaurant when did you know that it was connecting with the the masses when did you know Oh III there's a point where your name went from being just something people that knew you knew to people who didn't know you knew oh yeah I mean it's it's grown I mean I've ever had mass appeal but certainly it's grown yeah one of the Bane's of my existence is I I do Twitter and I do Facebook and I do it solely for the purpose of connecting with audience members really to kind of bypass the gatekeepers a little bit so that I can just tell people I'm gonna be at the blah blah blah and the people who might see me at the blah blah blah will be able to know that and come down that's that's all I want out of it I like writing jokes so I write jokes for Twitter I've pride myself and never having said I'm in the shower it's you know I just write jokes oh the jokes are in fact and I make little films for I have a YouTube channel and I make little films and I work at it so hard I am what I like to think of is a brilliant film about Thanksgiving and you know I watched the number just knowing that it was you know it only had a few days before people go oh why would you watch the Thanksgiving film where's you know someone can have a film of their you know of their goldfish eliminating waste and in a day there's a hundred thousand hits I can't see that I can't figure out how to marshal numbers in this direction but so I am I guess an acquired taste but what was the breaking point do you think in your career that suddenly put you on the national consciousness and before you say you're not a Paula Poundstone show name the Paula Poundstone show that's somebody people know it's a brand there goes off the air fairly quickly because not enough people watch i i was preempted by the malibu fires mostly just an orange television screen because yeah i don't really know i mean i there was never anything you know sort of meteoric i did a lot of one not a lot but I did some tonight shows when I was younger I think I did a couple with Johnny Carson I think probably when I covered the conventions for a J that that probably kicked the numbers upstairs a little bit more than other things also HBO which tends to rerun things a lot yeah when I did some HBO specials which well it was a good pairing being them I talked them into you know nowadays this doesn't seem different at all because technology has changed but you know my favorite thing to do is talk to the audience my favorite thing is you know what do you do for a living where you're from and any good night that I do usually has probably a third of it is unscripted I mean the whole thing is unscripted but probably a third of it is stuff I've never said before because it's spawned by the interaction with the crowd and that we're in or where I just came from so when I got hired to do special for HBO they didn't want to let me talk to the crowd because in those days miking things was different than it is now and they felt they actually said to me well it's different in a nightclub than it is on television anything I can make it work and boy I there's very few battles that I even bother fighting but that one I really could have stuck to my guns I said oh I don't know why you would hire me if you're not gonna let me talk to the crowd since that's the fun part right and so I kind of you know I won that argument and then there I was on stage it was a theater in San Francisco and we practice - the practice was there were boom mic guys that you know held the long stick with the furry thing on the end I would pretend to talk to a production assistant in a chair the boom mic guy had to practice running just you know get over there and I might the crowd from overhead as well but anyway so they put some expensive some time and effort into this technology and now the show is going and there's somebody over this way and I engage them in conversation there was a woman who had made a noise about a lawyer and she made a bad noise like she didn't like lawyers and I asked her why and yeah I kind of pushed her and pushed her to get her to tell me more information about why she cyclers it came out that her mother had had an accident where and they had to use a lawyer and I pushed her and push her tell me what the accident was with finally she blurted out that her mother had fallen in some sort of a car repair place and ripped her face off on a loop rack well this is a comedy show and now I've made this woman tell this horrible thing and I would I literally just would ha ha and and the whole crowd went up it was the most macabre if you inscripted it out and said and they'll make the lady tell the awful thing all I could picture was the people at HBO and how angry they were gonna be with me for making this lady tell this awful thing but in fact it ended up people to this day come up and say oh do you night remember the night with a lady with a loop rack or that was the thing that turned them on to me so I guess in answer to your earlier question about what made me more familiar to to viewers I think it would be that woman suffer now when you talk about the talking to the audience and having no idea what they're gonna say because then a lot of stuff that I read people are always questioning oh they're plants she has plans people often say me you don't bring notes or anything to your interviews and for me the challenges in this few moments together can we get the conversation going and it's almost like jumping off a cliff each time will it work won't it work and I've got to imagine that's like what it feels like for you it's the fun of it times where you know if somebody I save you know what do you do for Larry wouldn't someone tells me that there's some sort of a data program or a data analyst or something computer I do tend to glaze over you know where they met the guy they're with you know take a quick turn from now on but yeah that's the that's the fun part and after all I mean people are so amazed by that you know then you know but we have conversations all day long which are hopefully not totally unstimulating did they talk often about psychics from the turn of the century back the 1900 psychics and all of that how they talk about these things and they say they read people that's what the secret was they couldn't look at the audience that they knew from looking and behavior and I wonder if some of those kind of skills have developed you can look at that audience and you know that person there is gonna have story I want and that has it know I often get credit I hear my manager tell people that I just know how to pick the people it is absolutely untrue I sometimes am drawn to and I would say this is probably unsuccessful more times than as successful I am drawn to people who look angry people who are sitting the guys that are like this and clearly there are their wives or their girlfriends said to them alright well watch football tomorrow if we can go see this thing tonight and he's been dragged kicking and screaming something he doesn't want to go to those often intrigue me I don't know that they're better you know interviews for lack of a better word then someone more interesting or stimulating the room but I do tend to I tend to be drunk I could have a full house and one empty chair up front and all I can think about is that empty chair I'm wondering what what I said that made that person leave if it was the guy beside the empty chair that said something and then that person left see this worries me greatly because if I'm never at issue I hate to be pulled from an audience I hate to be called on all that and so whenever they start to do that I always try and look uninterested in kind of like because I think they're gonna think oh he's not gonna have fun with this we'll pick someone who looks like there is when we talk about this kind of interaction with the audience you didn't always do that in common you had your set jokes in the beginning to have you know because when I first started out we'd do open mic nights where anybody could do five minutes you go to sign up at the club and you'd bail out on to do your five minutes and I would at the time i bus tables for living was really the most appropriately suited job I've ever done I would type my jokes on the back of we had at the restaurant I worked out we had placemats that had the menu on him and when they would change the prices they were just they would just have stacks of these in the basement so this is even before recycle reuse was such a part of our lives but I would type my my jokes on the back these menus and and spend all day long I'd be bussing tables you know and my lips would be moving cuz be memorizing my act and then I go on stage and invariably it would all go out of my head usually because something distracted me or because somebody said something and that you know it distracted me and I would say to myself afterwards you know that this was a bad thing that I why did it you know why didn't I stick to my what's the matter with me that I can't stick to this thing I can't remember at what point I discovered that that's the fun part and often times when I would forget what I was going to say it actually would I would think of something to say that was funny or have an exchange with somebody that was funny but I still kept thinking that this was you know this was a terrible mark of unprofessionalism and somewhere along the way I discovered it was the fun part you know I would love to be in plays or do you know more acting sort of things I cannot however imagine doing the same thing night after night without just dying of boredom and phone enos yeah very early in your career though you did a film oh I did yeah I did a low-budget film which I've seen since we it was shot and Shelby North Carolina and a studio of a man who he built a movie studio in Shelby North Carolina on money that he had made from selling farm equipment and it was he prior to that the man who made the studio or all owns me he had started all all the films that were made there and including the Elvis story and what about Jesus I think and so anyways I've made this low-budget film there and they used a lot of the North Carolinians of course and at the time I really thought that I was you know I was the I was the I was the pro from Dover I was the talent that they had brought in I've since seen the film because somebody found it as a joke done it to me and it's it's painful to watch me and I gotta say that North Carolinians were great any perception at the time that I could have been the clinker but I was okay where's the peel way forward now wait wait don't tell me boy what a phenomenon the show has become it's a really fun show you know people like to keep up with what's going on in the world and it's a weekly news quiz show on NPR that includes questions about you know really truly major you know major topics things that are important and then it is peppered with you know news of the silly the questions that most of us can't answer you know and yeah I mean I think it's a what people tell me is they it's it's on usually on weekend mornings you know people tell me that they do their laundry to it or they do their breakfast dishes to it or they if they're in the car they do their errands to it and they and they like this but it's also really cheating way of figuring out what's going on does it surprise you the attention radio is getting again well yes and no radio radio is a wasted medium it's a great medium it's it's you know it's funny how Twitter has this thing it's a hundred and forty characters and people are so pleased with themselves you know radio is this very dimensional thing that just gets thrown away you know and it's too bad this is a I think wait wait don't tell me is a very good show and by the way having little or nothing to do with me I mean they conceived of it and made it before I came along but you know there's every now and then you'll somehow stumble on a radio play or you know I'm a huge fan of NPR just you know where they use the sound in there and the reporters know too you know masterfully how to include those elements and what they're doing and and as a listener I just find it really really rich and informative I'm so glad it's there and I'm you know I don't even allow my children to listen to the radio outside of that not because I mind the music by the way even though you know really lyrics that I'm not necessarily a fan of because I can't stand the people talk in between and the commercials you know and for my kids it's like it's a cheating kind of a pleasure like every now and then I get in the car when I've been away and I noticed that the radio is in fact dialed to something other than NPR but even my kids wait when we've occasionally listened for a few minutes even my kids will go okay we'll turn it off that now because they can't stand those commercials yeah do they get the idea that you're a showbiz mom I keep trying to impress them I say to them I'll go I'll say you know some people actually try to dress like me oh they do not I'm a part of America's pop culture and they say oh you are not they don't well maybe I'm exaggerating it maybe I've tried to make myself seem the other day a friend of mine was trying to teach me how to read a compass which by the way people have tried to teach me before and I have like a mental block ladies I guess I was really not my daughter picked it up right away and seems to understand it and eventually they just started talk around me and you know as he was telling me that you know the North is on the top of the map I said to him you know some people have said that I was a genius apparently genius has departments yes so the kids having been in the business you've been in and raising kids at the same time is it hard to be there for them and still in a sense be there for an audience other than in very literal you know obviously I have to go away I have to travel for a living which that part is a little bit challenging but but no I think I really think that I am in kind of the best of both worlds at this point in my life and it took a while to figure out the rhythms of both things one of the things that I do in terms of the travel that's made life it's just a simple thing but you know when when the kids were little I always read aloud to them every every night sometime in the middle of days Wow but we were always reading a book I can't remember how long it took me to figure this out but I I bring the book with me so that when we talk on the phone I would read aloud to them over the phone and it sounds really stupid but it made a big difference in our connection when we were apart because you know I don't have much to say to them about my life on the road that's really interesting and they really you know sometimes you go how was school and they go fine but it didn't mean we wanted to hang up the phone and so in this way you know I read the entire Harry Potter series aloud twice and you know the Hardy Boys have taken us through some long nights appear in there well thank you for taking us through so many nights and just being there for us if you'd like to learn more about our guests or watch other episodes of interviews visit our website at Houston public media.org slash interviews you

Channel: Houston Public Media

Views: 58,807

Rating: 4.8373384 out of 5

Keywords: innerVIEWS with Ernie Manouse, Paula Poundstone, Houston Public Media

Id: 5XQZk06NreI

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2016