Interview: Paula Poundstone Returns to Bay Street Theater on July 26

Comedian, podcast host and “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me” panelist Paula Poundstone will return to Bay Street Theater for the umpteenth time on Saturday, July 26, to perform stand-up.

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said during a recent phone interview. “I love it there.”

She has performed at the Sag Harbor venue every couple of years or so since 2004.

“I love just standing in the lobby looking at all the photos of the various casts of the various shows that they’ve done,” she said.

She expressed admiration for Bay Street’s role on the South Fork, staging shows with A-listers such as Alan Alda who join productions there because it’s fun and it serves the community.

However, she acknowledged that despite having appeared on the Bay Street stage herself many times, she’s never been an audience member there.

“I rarely travel in any way like a tourist,” she explained. “You know, I go to some of the coolest places, and the only thing I see is what I see out the window on my way to the hotel from the airport. I get to take in very little, which is too bad, but, you know, it’s a job. It’s a good job, it’s a great job, it’s a fun job, but it is a job.”

She said Bay Street reminds her of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in terms of how the seats are situated in relation to the stage. “The audience is, like, real accessible, so they’re especially fun to talk to. Although I talk to audiences everywhere I go — individuals, I mean. I do the time-honored ‘Where are you from? What do you do for a living?’ And those people in the Bay Street Theater are especially fun,” she said.

As she hears from the audience members and develops little biographies on them, she uses the things she learns as a jumping-off point for various stories and thoughts that make up her ever-changing act.

“What am I talking about these days? … I talk about both the stress itself and the source of the stress that so many of us — in fact, I go as far as to say all of us — are dealing with now in terms of the president,” she said.

Poundstone, who lives in Santa Monica, California, was also concerned about Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem saying in Los Angeles last month, “We are not going away; we are staying here to liberate this city.”

“I talk about not just the source of the stress, but living my daily life under that kind of stress and how that plays out,” she said.

She added that she can’t help but talk about travel.

“Everybody makes fun of comics for how much we talk about airplane travel, but we need to talk about it,” she said. “It’s like a third of my life. Yeah, it comes up here and there.”

Her stand-up sprouts from her personal experiences.

“My act is largely autobiographical, and so I talk about what I’m doing, I talk about what I’m thinking about. I’m talking about what I’m sort of focused in on my life at that time,” she said. “When I first started as a comic, I bussed tables for a living, and I talked a lot about that. When my kids were little, I talked about raising kids.”

She added that she doesn’t talk on stage about her kids much these days to respect their privacy.

“But, you know, there’s something about sharing parenting stories that is just enormously fun,” she said. “And the other thing about sharing parenting stories is parenting is an unbelievably stressful, lonely, hard job, and one of the things that makes it more lonely and more stressful and more hard is that people lie about it.”

She said that most of the time, when asked how the kids are, parents say “Great.”

“Very rarely does somebody go, ‘Kicking my m---------ing ass.’ Very rarely,” she said.

Raising children is “by its very nature, a really challenging thing to do,” she said, and when she shares on stage that she doesn’t have it all figured out, others recognize that in their own lives.

“That sort of heavy, leaden loneliness blanket gets pulled away to some degree,” she said.

It’s a phenomenon that is not unique to stand-up comedy.

“It doesn’t matter what kind of an audience you’re a part of,” she said. “It can be a symphony concert, it can be an opera, it can be a scary movie. It can be a rock band. It doesn’t matter. That thing of being among strangers and sharing an emotional response is powerful. And I think it makes you feel like you fit in. When you have the same response as other people, you go, ‘Oh, I’m a human being. Oh.’ And it’s so reassuring.”

In addition to performing in front of a live audience — on the road with her stand-up or with NPR’s “Wait Wait…” crew — she also entertains as the host of “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone.”

She said when she started the podcast seven years ago the throughline was “the stuff that you need to know to be an adult.”

She said when her kids became adults, there was a lot of stuff she couldn’t help them with because she had been at her job for so long.

“I don’t know the first thing about taxes because I’ve had accountants since I was 23 and so I really — well, no, I had accountants before I was 23 but those accountants cheated. I’ve had what I think are honest accountants since I was 23.”

She said after she blew through those kinds of topics — like how to read a Verizon bill — it became about whatever she finds interesting.

Sometimes, there are heavy topics, with guests such as attorney and journalist Dahlia Lithwick, Ezra Levin of Indivisible, historian Heather Cox Richardson and presidential advisor Fiona Hill.

“We still make jokes, but there’s no denying that the subjects themselves are really, you know, difficult and scary,” Poundstone said.

So she mixes things up with lighter fare, like having expert guests on to talk about monarch butterflies or the winter sport of curling.

“It’s both what I’m interested in, and sometimes it’s like what might be medicinal in this moment,” she said.

And as if Poundstone doesn’t already have enough to do, she’s also a voice actor, usually for children’s television and film. Last year, she reprised the role of Forgetter Paula in Pixar’s “Inside Out 2.”

“It was literally like one of my dreams to be in a Pixar movie, and I was lucky enough to be in one that had a sequel,” she said. “And my character, if you blink, you miss it, but it was still so damn much fun. And I feel so privileged to be a part of movies that were so good and helpful, actually. Because there’s real brain science in those movies, which just seems ridiculous, but there actually is. It’s covered in animation and comedy, but they consulted with brain scientists to understand what goes on inside the head.”

Her character was named after her, Forgetter Paula, but before she landed the role, the character was simply referred to in the script as “Female Forgetter.”

“For those not familiar with those movies, I play a character that works in the brain, doing the forgetting, which is ironic, given what a terrible memory I have,” Poundstone said.

Her kids got a kick out of it, she said. “Because forgetting is a big part of my life.”

Paula Poundstone will perform at Bay Street Theater on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor on Saturday, July 26, at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $130 to $150 at baystreet.org.