I don't learn from my mistakes. That's one of the hallmarks of being Pala Poundstone.

I do not learn from my mistakes.

Hello and welcome to Good One, a podcast about jokes. I'm your host, Jesse David Foss.

This week's guest is Pala Poundstone.

I first started trying to book Pala like about a year and a half ago after Mosher casher came on.

He was promoting his crowd work album and when he was talking about the people that inspired him,

he kept on pointing to Pala Poundstone. And I had a vague memory of seeing this and her

specials growing up, but after one Mosher said, I rewatched Pala's seminal 1990 HBO special cats

cops and stuff. And wow, it really is like nothing I had seen before, including specials that

have come out since, including specials that are explicitly about crowd work, the way she's sort

of just doing material and then she calls on a guy in the audience and then like talks to someone

completely in a different place in the audience and then we'll call back things she said about one

conversation and everyone in the audience is like up to speed and like very much in the room.

It is so rare for a special to be able to capture what it's like to actually be in the audience

and something about how Pala was able to do these, you actually got that.

As Pala and I discussed, it's a style she cultivated early. After barely in her 20s,

she moved from the agro Boston comedy scene to the more artistically supportive San Francisco

around the turn of the 1980s. And it's still the style she performs in today as she's

backdoing live gigs, including Town Hall in New York on October 7th. Go to polypoundsome.com

slash tour. So before the interview, I want to play a clip from Cats, Cops and stuff that showcases

all of this. It is an incredible piece of stand-up comedy. It's an incredible display of the powers

of the stand-up comedian. It's even more incredible that this was recorded at a special taping in 1990.

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