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  • Paula Poundstone drops in on Buffalo State College tonight. Contributed Photo

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October 16, 2009

NIGHTLIFE: Poundstone performs at Buffalo State

By Phil Dzikiy



Paula Poundstone has been a successful stand-up comedian for roughly three decades, but her most recent comedy album is, well, her first comedy album.

Night & Day talked to Poundstone while she was in Hawaii. Her performance tomorrow night will be in a decidedly less exotic location — Buffalo State College.

Poundstone is proud of her first album, “I Heart Jokes: Paula Tells Them in Maine,” but releasing a CD was never on her to-do list.

“I guess I never felt that there was a big hole left by me not releasing a comedy CD before,” Poundstone said. “Even when I did it ... I still didn’t feel that I was filling a need.”

One of the main reasons Poundstone didn’t consider recording an album in the past is due to a significant staple of her live performances: audience participation. She thought that part of her act wouldn’t come across as well due to older recording practices.

“I think if I would have done it years ago ... I don’t think it would work,” she said.

On “I Heart Jokes,” Poundstone believes the audience comes across well on CD, and listeners aren’t excluded.

As for her current material, Poundstone recently appeared on “The Late Show with Craig Ferguson” and included a few political bits in her brief set. A Democrat, Poundstone admits that her own political party doesn’t give her quite as much material as the GOP.

“We are just not as funny as the Republicans,” she said. “When we’re in power, the writing’s a little harder ... Jay Leno used to say to me, ‘Well, if you make fun of one side, you have to make fun of the other. I said, ‘No I don’t! I actually don’t, if it’s not funny!’ ”

That being said, Poundstone has done a fair amount of Obama jokes recently, as well.

“I love to hear him speak, but I do think ... that there’s a danger of being sucked in and being nothing there,” she said.

Poundstone is on the road often, but there are also weeks when she’s at home, with her children and her cats — 13 of them. Cats, not kids.

“Believe me, we’re a couple past my personal cutoff point,” she said.

When she’s not with her family or touring the stand-up circuit, Poundstone can often be found as a panelist on National Public Radio’s popular quiz show, “Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!”

“I’m on about once a month,” she said. “It is so much fun to do. It’s just a blast to do.”

And like many people — and many other comedians — Poundstone has taken to Twitter. She has two main objectives while “tweeting.” The first is to do what she always does: tell jokes. But she also finds Twitter valuable in getting her message across, straight from the source.

“What I really want to be able to do is to access the crowd who likes to come see me without going through the gatekeepers,” she said.

But as Twitter works both ways, Poundstone is also following a lot of folks — more than 8,000 — on Twitter. And she’s noticed that, as a nation, we need to get more sleep.

“I think the number one topic that I read about on a daily basis is how tired everyone is,” Poundstone said. “America is, in fact, sleep-deprived. It’s interesting to me.”

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