Paula’s perspective

David Renzi

Thursday, Sept. 12, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

Blame the idiot (see byline above) for the fumbling start with Paula Poundstone, who fielded two extremely idiotic questions ("What's going on?" and "Still smoking cigars?") with two appropriate answers ("Well, nothing" and "No, thank goodness. Not at this time").

Such pleasantries are designed to ease the celebrity into chat mode for the moderately idiotic questions to come. Sorry, not this time.

You know you're screwing up when you've got a professional talker on the line, and all you're getting is, "Well, nothing," followed by horrible silence. So you jettison the chaff and proceed directly to the wheat, which in Poundstone's case is parenthood. Foster parenthood, to be precise.

It worked. What followed was an uninterrupted stream of pure Poundstone, punctuated by a profanity.

"I felt like I should be able to do something lasting and something that has importance, so that if I were going to kick tomorrow, I could have a nice list of things that I achieved, and not for anybody at the (bleeping) pearly gates or anything."

If they're keeping points, Poundstone says, "I'd give them the finger and go straight to hell."

The 36-year-old comic, who's more sit-down than standup, has two girls, ages 5 and 2, and had an infant boy. She became a foster parent for the first time in 1993.

"You could probably count the things that would be more difficult," she says of returning the infant to his biological parents. "The good news is ... no idiot in show business can do anything to me (and hurt her). I've been there and back again. You know what the worst possible scenario is now, and once you know that you don't have to worry about it."

The girls have become the center of her life, and she made room for them by curtailing her career.

"I'm not quite as prolific as I once was," she says. "To me, writing is not really sitting with a pen and paper. That's secretarial work. That's transcribing what is already conceived, and to me the real writing part takes place while I'm vacuuming or scrubbing the kitchen floor or driving or cleaning the carpet with Scotch tape, and that's when my mind would drift in all directions and come up with an idea or a joke.

"And now, a lot of the time, I'm trying to think how to get my 5-year-old to eat, or how to get my 5-year-old to use the bathroom by herself in the middle of the night, or I'll review how badly I just dealt with my 5-year-old. It does permeate everything."

Including her traveling schedule, which Poundstone has curbed dramatically since breaking into the business in 1979.

"I still go on the road, but I would take long stretches of work. I stopped that a long time ago because it was thoroughly unpleasant. I was cracking. I was spending five, six nights a week doing nightclubs on the road. It was just not the right thing for me to be stashed in a hotel for a week."

Poundstone maintained the schedule for 10 years.

"And I hated it after about the first six months. I didn't hate every moment of it, but I hated the way of living. It was really, really lonely. If you're at home, you can do something for your house or your apartment, something that feels like it has some kind of permanence. On the road, you're mostly just killing time."

Worse, she would often find herself in some remote hotel.

"The only way you could get to the grocery store, or get a soda that didn't cost three bucks out of a machine -- OK, a buck -- was for the guy who ran the nightclub to pick you up and take you. It was like being in junior high school; you're old enough to have some independence but not old enough to drive."

The saving grace was show time.

"The part on stage, I can only think of 10 times when it was awful," she says.

Poundstone says she arrived at her conversational style because she has a terrible memory for joke-telling.

"The effort it takes to memorize a set exactly so outweighs the product that it's not a good return."

The way she works also ensures a minimum of repetition, which became a concern when she was employed at a San Francisco nightclub.

"It was a comedy club by night and a burrito house by day," says Poundstone, who took orders by day, told jokes by night and became sensitive to the opinions of the staff.

"I'd hear them bellyache the next day, 'So and so is always doing the same thing.' Even if it was a brilliant five minutes or a brilliant hour, the staff had heard it a million times. I still think they're probably the best judge of what's good and what's bad. They're in the room all the time. I get really self-conscious about repeating myself in front of them, especially when you have three shows to do a night. You'd get sick of your own material."