.paulapoundstone is one of the all-time masters of crowd work. On the GoodOnePodcast, she discusses how she first got into it, the energy of her shows, and why her audience is her best friend
Paula Poundstone. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photo by Michael S. Schwartz/Getty Images Paula Poundstone does not like the term “crowd work.” She finds it “antiseptic,” like a service one can request on TaskRabbit: “I need someone to do some crowd work for an hour on Saturday night.” And yet, she is one of the all-time greats at it.
The other thing that happened — one of the probably the luckiest things that ever happened to me as a comic was at the wonderful Other Café in San Francisco, where I often hosted open-mic nights. There you might be bringing on, like, I don’t know, 25 people. And your job is you open the night, tell some jokes, and bring up a comic. The comic may be very good or they may really be awful, but your job is to keep the audience there.
On the Energy of Her Live Shows As much as possible, I want the room to feel like the Rosses’ basement. They were my next-door neighbors when I was growing up in a small town in Massachusetts. Mrs. Ross, who was really a wonderful woman, went partially deaf when we were kids. Hearing aids weren’t what they are now.
I love working theaters. It’s a real different vibe than the handful of clubs — usually they’re music clubs — where I work. But there’s a big difference between someone “heckling” or interrupting than what I have going on, and sometimes you try to explain it to the staff. Generally speaking, it’s not an issue. But every now and then, they’ll be like, “We’ll keep people quiet.” “No, I don’t want to keep people quiet.” If somebody was being an asshole, that’s one thing.
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