Paula Poundstone brought her irreverent brand of comedy Friday night to a capacity crowd at The Sharon L. Morse Performing Arts Center.
As she bantered with audience members and poked fun at herself in a nonstop show of nearly two hours, the crowd couldn’t stop laughing.
Poundstone has done a series of HBO comedy specials, appeared on “TheTonight Show” and spent her early career touring as a standup comedian.
She served as a foster mother for eight children and adopted two daughters and a son. She battled alcoholism that resulted in a 2001 arrest and subsequent treatment.
“I fly fish in the stream of consciousness,” she said to describe her comedy style. Her performance was at least 75 percent improvisational and tailored to a Villages audience. She looked clownish in a bright red jacket, wide red and white tie and black and white shoes.
She stayed away from politics, noting only that someone warned her there are a lot of Tea Party members in The Villages.
Instead, she focused on golf carts, Florida weather and society’s addiction to electronic gadgets.
“It’s just too sultry here,” she said. “It’s like being in a Petri dish. You put Saran Wrap over everything in your home, you could grow stuff.”
A longtime California resident, Poundstone seemed mystified by one audience member who said she moved to The Villages 16 years ago from Santa Barbara.
“Did you come here in a golf cart?” Poundstone asked the woman.
Now in her 50s, Poundstone said she’s been cutting up AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) cards for years.
“Eventually you lose strength and you can’t cut them up anymore,” she said, adding that the same thing probably happens with brochures from The Villages.
She admitted that she has 15 cats, but said also owning two dogs makes her an animal lover instead of a cat woman.
“People ask me, ‘how did you get 15 cats?’” she said. “I had 14 cats and then I got one more. Mostly I go to the store for cat food and human food is incidental.”
She quipped with another audience member who said he is an animal researcher specializing in the endangered Caribbean rock lizard and the animal that became a running joke throughout the rest of her performance.
On a more serious note, Poundstone criticized society’s addiction to computers, tablets and electronic devices. She said it’s wrong for teachers to incorporate these devices into the classroom because they are harmful to developing brains.
Poundstone told the audience she suffers from glaucoma and obsessive compulsive disorder, which helps her turn every conversation back to herself. She said she wrote a book about herself, for example, by starting out to write a biographical chapter on Abraham Lincoln.
She also told the audience that she is an atheist, noting a benefit is that she won’t be showing up on their doorsteps to convert them.
