Paula Poundstone

Kip and I went to see Paula Poundstone play the Blender Theater on Saturday night, and she was funny and awkward and wonderful. Some of her material is old material--but that's okay, that's part of what we want from comedians, is to hear their most famous bits, even if we know the punchlines.

She is famous for her crowd work, all of which is improvisational. This is where she picks someone out of the crowd, talks to them about what they do for a living, or who they came with, and generally makes a hilarious mess of them. It seems random, but she picks the most interesting people. At our show, she picked on: 1) a publisher who's currently editing a porn star's autobiography and previously published "The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women," 2) a real estate appraiser who claimed to make "a lot of money" doing what she does, 3) a gay guy who helps people get out of debt, 4) a waitress who insulted Isaac Mizrahi's cabaret show which played the theater the previous night, and 5) a maple syrup seller. Ya. Me.

I knew she was going to pick on me. I could feel it as soon as we walked into the room. There was an empty seat beside me, we were in the third row, I was wearing a plaid shirt. These jokes write themselves, ladies and gentlemen. Paula wanted to know if there was any syrup rivalries at the Greenmarket, and indeed there are--I made it out to be an issue over plastic vs. glass bottles, which is the major issue in my opinion--and she rolled with that a few times. She even gave me a callback later in the evening, proclaiming that she'd tried a black market maple syrup ring herself, only in paper bags, and thus her business failure. It it surely one of the highlights of my show-going life.