Paula Poundstone at the Carolina
Paula Poundstone at The Carolina Theatre
By Scott Ross Ask most people what Improvisational Comedy means and chances are they’ll assume you’re referring to what happens on “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?” or (at the other extreme, and with more preparation) Viola Spolin’s noble experiment in Chicago, which led to the original Second City and the ascendancy of its graduates—Alan Alda, Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Joan Rivers, Severn Darden, Roger Bowen, Robert Klein, Paul Mazursky, and, earlier, Mike Nichols and Elaine May—to the Pantheon of post-war American humor. Those are valid responses, of course, but the greater form is that practiced occasionally by Robin Williams and wholly by Mel Brooks in his heyday with Carl Reiner: wading in without prepared remarks. Call it what you will—working without a net, riffing on the audience itself—it’s the comedian’s equivalent of an extended jazz break, an ability so uncanny it’s almost akin to spiritual channeling. And while there are, seemingly, thousands of comics around, big and small, more than ready to perform what Spaulding Gray once called “genital-scented humor” (“pop!” “bang!” “pow!”), usually on the prescribed topics, there are never more than a handful of true verbal magicians in existence at any one time. Paula Poundstone is more than one in a million; she’s one in 300 million. She was in top form last Friday evening, when she brought her Big Picture tour to convulsively funny life in Fletcher Hall at The Carolina Theatre in Durham, skewering with deadly accuracy everything from the ubiquity of Viagra commercials and the media’s current obsession (in which the news is about “how everyone’s talking about Martha Stewart”) to her own, much publicized, difficulties with alcohol, during which she “got a court order to attend Alcoholics Anonymous—on television.” Poundstone, as her website correctly maintains, is not a comic “defined by the usual gender-biased topics of relationships, diets, men, or sex.” Yet the last time I saw this astonishing American treasure, at Charley Goodnight’s in Raleigh, some unsung idiot booked three female stand-ups to open for her, and all three made endless (and largely puerile) jokes about—wait for it—relationships, diets, men, and sex. It was as though Henny Youngman had introduced Lily Tomlin. Although she now works a good deal of material concerning her foster and adopted children into the mix, Poundstone’s observations are the furthest thing from the usual young comedian’s applause-milking pap about family or—more horrifying—the precious, sick-making bilge we used to get courtesy of Art Linkletter. Poundstone’s world is one in which her daughter uses cerebral palsy as an attention-getting device, abandoning her mother to the task of explaining it to strangers (“Really, she doesn’t fall over any more than the rest of us”); her son’s grammar school teacher thinks she’s reading obscenities to the class when the phrase “silly ass” turns up in Emil and the Detectives; and their school requires parents to compose something called “Comfort Notes” in case of emergency. Poundstone also delivered a phalanx of achingly funny remarks on any number of peripatetic subjects: the increasing difficulty, in our age of ear-bud cell phones, to tell CEO from the schizophrenic; the insanity of injecting man-made fat into our food. Concerning Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Poundstone proved her own manifestation of the condition -- as she phrases it, her “inability to stop talking”—by regaling us for over two hours, sans the intermission she forgot to stop for. I doubt anyone minded. We were all much too busy laughing. Paula Poundstone: http://www.paulapoundstone.com/. John Lambert and Classical Voice of North Carolina reprint these reviews online at http://www.cvnc.org/Theatre.html.
posted by Scott Ross at 10:00 AM
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