On January 11, comedian Paula Poundstone made a short video for social media: “Day 307 of Saving our Democracy.” She encouraged viewers to make sure they were registered to vote, and she bounced one time on a pogo stick, stating she’d add one bounce each day until the mid-term elections on Nov. 3.
“I said from the very beginning of this thing, I will add a pogo on my pogo stick every day until we take back the House and the Senate,” Poundstone told me in a recent interview. She’s now well over 100 bounces and has had one “spectacular fall,” which she regrets not including in that day’s video.
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On Friday, May 22, Poundstone will perform in St. Cloud at the Paramount Center for the Arts, part of a vigorous touring schedule she keeps up alongside her online and on-air antics. She posts daily “Hey Donald Trump” video rants, is a frequent panelist on NPR’s weekly comic news quiz, “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” and hosts a podcast, “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone,” with fellow “Wait Wait” panelist Adam Felber.
At 66, Poundstone shows no sign of slowing down, though she does note some irritating aspects of aging, like forgetting stuff. “As a person who performs on stage, word recall is kind of important,” she said. “There’s a thing called timing. If I think of the name or the item from the story minutes later, it’s not really helpful in a joke.”
She also has a career-related problem where people can’t always tell if she’s serious. “I would say to my eye doctor, ‘Sometimes I just don’t know what I’m looking at,’ and he would laugh,” she said. “That went on for about a year and a half, where he just thought that was the funniest thing.”
Poundstone’s early career, beginning in Boston in 1979 and continuing in San Francisco and then Los Angeles after being discovered by Robin Williams, had early intersections with politics. During the 1992 presidential election, she became a political correspondent for Jay Leno’s “The Tonight Show” and the first female solo host of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Recently, there’s perhaps more urgency to her political humor. She attributes the inspiration for her social media videos to historian Heather Cox Richardson, who started her “Letters from an American” Substack in 2019. Poundstone said she appreciated Cox Richardson’s focus on meaningful steps the average person could take.
“At one point (Richardson) said, ‘Get your voices out there,’” Poundstone recalled. “So I started making these videos. When I’m really exhausted, I blame Heather Cox Richardson.”
Poundstone tapes her pogo-sticking ahead of her travel schedule, but she creates her “Dear Donald Trump” videos while on tour. She’s had to ditch the colorful oversized suits she’s known for wearing on stage, instead donning comfy sweatshirts or flannel jackets and a baseball cap. There’s only so much time to dress up, after all.
On traveling days, she leaves pre-dawn for the airport and then sleeps on the plane, which she finds easy to do. “I’m perpetually exhausted,” she said. Once she gets to the hotel, she’ll take a short nap before filming. “There’s nights where I never get to bed, because every one of those videos takes about four hours,” she said.
Still, she said the political moment compels her to reach a wide audience. Not long ago, she was protesting on Wilson Boulevard near her home in Santa Monica, California. “It takes me about an hour to (walk) up there, and then I would stay there for about 20 to 30 minutes, and then walk back another hour. I think it was a good thing to do. But I used to try to count the cars, and I’m like, you know what? I think with the videos I’m getting more people.”
At the time of Renee Good’s death in Minneapolis, Poundstone was heading to Billings, Montana for a show. She made a call to her contact asking for help finding a local protest, and made a request for poster board and markers. “I go into my hotel, and by God, there were posters and magic markers,” she said.
Traveling the U.S. is part of what keeps her touring, despite the exhaustion. “The truth is, we live in a really beautiful country,” Poundstone said. “Everybody needs to put an oar in the water and pull at this point in the same direction to save what we have.”
Poundstone performs at St. Cloud’s Paramount Center for the Arts on Friday, May 22 at 7:30 p.m. ($30-$33). More information here.
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