Considered one of the foremost comics working today, award-winning humorist Paula Poundstone returns to the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College at 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 15. Some show content may not be appropriate for children.
Perhaps most widely known as a panelist on NPR's popular weekly news quiz program, "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me," Poundstone is famous for her razor-sharp wit and spontaneity.
Said Peter Sagal, host of the show, "People love Paula Poundstone and they always have. The amazing thing about Paula is that she has an amazingly distinctive personality. You can see a lot of really, really great comedians, but you may walk away without a sense of who they really are. Paula comes out on stage and she starts talking about her life and then 20 minutes later you realize you're in the middle of her comedy act and didn't really know it."
Poundstone began nurturing her stand-up comedy talent in 1979 on the Boston comedy circuit; though by 1990 she had moved to Los Angeles, starred in multiple HBO comedy specials and appeared on "Saturday Night Live." She was the first woman to receive a Cable ACE Award for a comedy special for her one-hour HBO show "Cats, Cops, and Stuff," and the first woman invited to entertain at the prestigious White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Poundstone received a second Cable ACE Award for her self-titled HBO talk show series, as well as an Emmy for her field pieces on the PBS program "Life & Times." She is recognized as one of Comedy Central's 100 greatest stand-ups of all time, has won an American Comedy Award for Best Female Standup Comic, and in 2010 was one of a select group voted into the Comedy Hall of Fame.
For her live shows Poundstone draws upon her own complex life: three children, multiple cats, a demanding job and crazy travel schedule, and aging, as well as her signature bag of neuroses. Every show is unique as she works with each audience, engaging audience members in humorous dialogue.
About Poundstone's stand-up, Nick Zaino with the Boston Globe, wrote, "You know Poundstone's a great comic the way you know any fine performer when you see one - there's a disarming ease in her craft, an immediate sense that she's so quick on her feet you need never worry about the possibility of something going wrong."
One of her dreams came true when cast as "Forgetter Paula" in Disney Pixar's Inside Out, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film in 2016. On June 28, 2016, her first "double live" CD entitled "North by Northwest: Paula Poundstone Live!" debuted at #1 on Amazon's "Hot New Releases - Non-fiction" list.
In her most recent book, The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness, Poundstone takes on that most inalienable of rights - the pursuit of happiness. Offering herself up as a human guinea pig, she tries out a different get-happy hypothesis in a series of "thoroughly scientific" experiments. She gets in shape with taekwondo. She drives fast behind the wheel of a Lamborghini. She communes with nature while camping with her teenage daughter, and more. Tony and Emmy Award-winner Lily Tomlin described the book as "A remarkable journey. I laughed. I cried. I got another cat."
Watch Poundstone on a recent episode of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyHCIhFsZoA.
Tickets are $34 and $28 and are available online at www.durangoconcerts.com, or call 247-7657, or visit the Ticket Office inside the Durango Welcome Center at Eighth Street and Main Avenue in downtown Durango. All sales are final.
The Community Concert Hall is a not-for-profit, multi-use performance venue located on the campus of Fort Lewis College. Its ability to bring a diverse spectrum of shows to Southwest Colorado is made possible through a partnership with the college, a state-supported, independent institution of higher education, and through financial and in-kind contributions from generous members of the community.
