Paula Poundstone knows she can get a little carried away.

But sometimes, she even surprises herself. The gregarious comedian has been known to pepper her onstage sets with long and detailed conversations with the audience, and she told Pasatiempo recently that she was late to one of her shows a few years ago because she was conversing with a toddler.

“I was on a train one time,” Poundstone says. “I was reading The Mueller Report, and there was a family sitting across from me with a couple of little kids. The parents looked exhausted. The kids were getting antsy. I missed my stop. And I had to call in and tell the theater that I was going to be late because I was reading aloud The Mueller Report to a two-year-old.”

Poundstone will be playing the Lensic Performing Arts Center on Friday, March 24, and after 40 years of touring, she says it’s still the best job in the world. Her kids have grown up and moved out of the house, and she’s relishing the chance to tour again, post-pandemic.

“I have a theory that my bones are being worn away by airplane travel,” she says. “But I see elderly flight attendants sometimes. And they seem to be able to handle it.”

Poundstone says she grew up wanting to be like Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore, Gilda Radner, and Lily Tomlin and that she “missed by a country mile.” She was born in Alabama but grew up in Massachusetts, and her comedy career began in Boston when she was just 19 years old.

Poundstone earned some success with her act and took a Greyhound bus across the country to try telling her jokes in other cities. Eventually, she landed in San Francisco and began working at a club called The Other Café.

That’s when she met the late Robin Williams, who she describes as “the Tasmanian Devil of Standup Comedy,” a chaotic ball of energy who moved the needle for an entire industry.

“I always tell people that any comic my age or younger owes a debt to Robin Williams,” she says. “He didn’t invent standup comedy, but he reignited interest almost single-handedly. He was such an exciting performer. And he went everywhere. No matter who was on stage when he stopped by a club, you had to get off stage. The whole audience wouldn’t stop looking at Robin Williams and were very excited that he would drop by. People went out a lot of times at least in the back of their minds thinking, ‘Oh, Robin Williams might show up,’ and while they waited for him, they got to know the rest of us.”

Poundstone was named the funniest female comic by the American Comedy Awards in 1989, and the following year, she won a cable ACE Award for her HBO special

“When I started out, I was 19. I would go to open mic night in Boston with my carefully memorized five 7minutes. I would step on stage and go blank, so I’d be forced to say, ‘You, sir, what a fine tie you’re wearing.’ ”

Even from the beginning, one of the most distinctive parts of her act was the way she interacted with the audience. She will ask people in the crowd what they do and who they came with, or she’ll ask them about their clothes.

She says she began working the crowd because she has a terrible memory.

“When I started out, I was 19. I would go to open mic night in Boston with my carefully memorized five minutes. I would step on stage and go blank, so I’d be forced to say, ‘You, sir, what a fine tie you’re wearing.’”

Poundstone adds that Boston was a notoriously sexist and misogynistic market for performers, and when she started out, it was almost de rigueur for audiences to shout out to the comedian on stage. Some comics, she says, started building arsenals of anti-heckler material, but she never wanted to do that.

She’s now lying on her back, her feet propped on a stool, when she tells the audience she’ll put on a puppet show. “Hey, how are you?” one of her feet says.

“What kind of question is that?” the other replies.

She preferred a kinder, more wholesome interaction with the crowd. Over time, she says she logged notes on every set and would critique herself for talking to the crowd and going astray from her prepared material.

One day, she realized those tangents were actually some of the best parts of her set. Today, when asked if she keeps up with audience members she’s spoken to, she laughs out loud.

“I need to put some kind of tracking device on each of them,” she says. During her 2006 Bravo special, Look What the Cat Dragged In, one of her audience interactions goes on for several minutes.

She begins speaking to an audience member who is engaged and sitting next to her fiancé. Poundstone, making polite conversation, asks if the man proposed to the woman, and he takes offense at her seemingly innocent query.

“‘How many women do you hear proposing to men?’ he asks. “‘What kind of question is that?’”

Here’s where Poundstone is at her best. “I’ll handle this,” she tells the audience, and she spends the next several minutes hilariously turning the tables.

“What if she handled your question the way you handled mine?” she asks. “What kind of question is that? Will you marry me? What are you talking about?”

Poundstone doesn’t let it go. She’s now lying on her back, her feet propped on a stool, when she tells the audience she’ll put on a puppet show.

“Hey, how are you?8” one of her feet says. “What kind of question is that?” the other replies. Seventeen years later, Poundstone still laughs about that interaction. “I think everybody at the show that night would like to know if they’re still together,” she says.

Poundstone, who worked for years as part of the Comic Relief telecasts that benefited those experiencing homelessness, is a comedy pioneer in at least one respect: She was the first comic to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 1992.

She says there wasn’t as much attention on the event back then, and it wasn’t televised. But more than that, the jokes were kinder and gentler than they are today. Poundstone says she watched the dinner in 2018 and felt uncomfortable with the way comedian Michelle Wolf made jokes about former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

“It’s not that the things she was saying weren’t true and weren’t funny. Because they were true, and they were funny,” she says. “But who she was saying it to, it made my skin crawl. I couldn’t do that.

“When I did it, the first George Bush was president. I’m sitting beside the guy. And I didn’t like him as a president. I didn’t want him to be president. But I think the strongest thing I said to him was, ‘Good luck in the private sector.’ And [Wolf] was talking about how ugly this woman is, the woman who went on to become the governor of Arkansas. She’s sitting right there!”

Poundstone loves political humor and has often joked about having an addiction to presidential punchlines during the previous administration, but she says there’s still plenty to laugh about in 2023.

When she’s not touring, her primary avenue of expression is through her podcast, Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone, which she’s been recording for four years and 243 episodes.

Poundstone jokes that it’s never going to make her a wealthy woman. “There are literally millions of podcasts, so you’re dividing a pie. And I’m getting a dieter’s portion,” she says. “You know the one percent of people who have more money than the rest of us put together? It’s like that in podcasting, too. There’s the Joe Rogan levels. Then there’s the rest of us.”