Comedian Paula Poundstone headed to Egyptian Theatre in DeKalb

Sharing laughter as a restorative tonic with her audience, groundbreaking comedian Paula Poundstone will take the stage at 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 4, at the Egyptian Theatre in DeKalb.

“I’ve been really lucky to do this job for so long through so many phases of my life,” Poundstone said in a phone interview.

The first female comic to perform stand-up at the White House Correspondents Dinner, she is the star of several HBO specials. Poundstone is a regular panelist on NPR’s comedy news quiz “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” and her book “The Totally Unscientific Study of the Search for Human Happiness” was a semifinalist for The Thurber Prize for American Humor. She is heard weekly on her comedy podcast, “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone,” which she calls “heavy on the goofy; that is a prescription for the times” (paulapoundstone.com).

To hear Poundstone tell it, her career in comedy can be traced to a little parental inattention. As her mom napped, her very young daughter discovered the joy of watching “I Love Lucy” and Three Stooges reruns, calling them her babysitters.

“I love the sound of laughter and the response of laughter,” Poundstone said, calling humans a lucky species. “Nature has given us this helpful coping mechanism – this sense of humor. … It was pretty easy to decide I wanted to be a comic of some sort. A comic actress was what I was familiar with. I happened to be living in Boston in 1979, bussing tables for a living, [so I] didn’t turn my back on a law degree [when] a couple guys started up a stand-up comedy circuit.”

Poundstone describes her act as largely autobiographical, noting her favorite part of the show is asking audience members in tried-and-true fashion: Where are you from and what do you do for a living?

“I use that from where to set my sails; the truth is I largely don’t know what I’ll talk about,” Poundstone said of her comedy shows, noting it’s all dependent upon who is in front of her.

The pandemic prompted new insights.

“This experience of enjoying a show of some sort – be it a movie or a concert or dance – you sit with strangers and collectively experience human emotions, which I had never really thought about before. We came out of the caves. It’s a really long-standing pivotal part of life, part of where we get our humanity, part of where we get our empathy. We feel like human beings because we’re sharing the same emotion.”

As often as people add “lol” to a message, they rarely laugh out loud when by themselves, at best it’s a smile or chortle, Poundstone said, adding, “When you’re in a group of people, you get caught up in the waves of laughter.”

The connections are meaningful for the artist and the audience.

IF YOU GO

WHAT: Comedian Paula Poundstone

WHERE: Egyptian Theatre, 135 N. Second St., DeKalb

WHEN: 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 4

INFORMATION: 815-758-1215, egyptiantheatre.org