Career
Paula Poundstone started doing stand-up comedy at open-mic nights in Boston in 1979. She characteristically performs dressed in a suit and tie. In 1984, Poundstone was cast in the movie Hyperspace but she did not further pursue an acting career. Instead, she continued as a comedian and began appearing on several talk shows. In 1989, she won the American Comedy Award for "Best Female Stand-Up Comic." In 1990, she wrote and starred in an HBO special called Cats, Cops and Stuff, for which she won a CableACE Award. She worked as a political correspondent for The Tonight Show during the 1992 US Presidential campaign and did the same for The Rosie O'Donnell Show in 1996. In 1993, Poundstone won a second CableACE Award, and began writing the column, "Hey, Paula!" for Mother Jones (1993–1998). Paula featured in her own variety show, The Paula Poundstone Show, on ABC (which lasted only two episodes). She was also a regular panelist for the game shows Hollywood Squares and To Tell the Truth, and NPR's Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
Poundstone has also worked as a voice actress. She voiced Judge Stone on Science Court (also known as Squigglevision), an edutainment cartoon series done in the Squigglevision style that aired on Saturday mornings on ABC Kids in 1997. Staying with the makers of Science Court, Tom Snyder Productions, she was the voice of the mom, Paula Small, in the cartoon series Home Movies for the show's first five episodes, which aired on UPN. Between the show's 1999 UPN cancellation and 2000 revival on Cartoon Network, Paula chose to leave the show. The show's character, Paula Small, was named and loosely modeled around Poundstone.
Paula is #88 on Comedy Central's 2004 list of the 100 greatest stand-ups of all time, and #7 on Maxim magazine's list of "Worst Comedians of All Time."
She had her own Bravo special as part of their three-part Funny Girls series, along with Caroline Rhea and Joan Rivers, titled "Look What the Cat Dragged In."
Around the same time as her Bravo special, Poundstone released her first book, There Is Nothing in this Book That I Meant to Say. Described as an autobiography that is "part memoir, part monologue," the book intertwines historical biographies with anecdotes from her own life.
Poundstone currently works as a panelist on the radio news quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! on National Public Radio. She is also a regular guest on A Prairie Home Companion, appearing in Los Angeles shows and at joke shows.
Poundstone released her first comedy CD, "I Heart Jokes," in 2009.
In 2011, she was a panelist on a BBC America year end special of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me
Read more about this topic: Paula Poundstone
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)