COMEDY REVIEW : Ad-Libbing Offsets Poundstone Pearls

After watching Paula Poundstone for 80 minutes, you felt like you knew something about her, too much about the audience and too little about her best jokes.

Frustrating. Because Poundstone has some great material. But at Thursday’s show at the Improv in Pacific Beach, where she also headlines tonight and Sunday, she chose to chat it up with the audience.

Through her intimate, conversational style, we learned that a student, a horse-trailer salesman, an interior designer and a traffic-signal repairman from Chula Vista were among the crowd of 293 people.

We also learned that Poundstone just bought a house she’s afraid to live in, owns five cats, is bad at math, and that sex, the electoral college and computers all leave her blank.

There’s nothing wrong with knowing this, but she needs to wrap it around more humor. As Poundstone bounced from stock material to audience participation, the veteran of Carson, Letterman and her own HBO special never hit a funny streak she could sustain.

The stock material was good. The audience segments were, for the most part, tedious. She has great stuff in her arsenal, so why not use it? Why try to mine the crowd for uncertain laughs when she can just reach into her quiver and pull out quality stuff?

Comedians take a chance when they make the audience a large part of the act. To make this work, comics need to let the house know they have good material before heading into uncertain waters.

Poundstone started to establish her credentials, but then headed into ad-lib territory before finishing the job.

She was topical, educational, observational, curious and analytical, frequently punctuating her quirky insights with “Just an observation.”

When she was doing her written material, the crowd loved it.

“Do you think there were some nights when teen-age Indian girls hogged the fire all night?”

“I don’t have sex because I don’t like it. . . . I’d have to marry a Mormon so someone could cover my shift.”

On occasion, Poundstone (known for a quick wit) did pull off some good lines using the crowd. Particularly when she admonished one patron who was confused between Betty Ford and Nancy Reagan. “Sir, the first ladies change every few years.”

Or explaining an injury related to Pop Tarts after someone sent a box of the breakfast treats to the stage. “They’re Pop Tarts. Not Stick-Your-Hand-in-and-Get-’Em Tarts.”

But these moments were too few and far apart.

When trying to get the graphics-arts student to open up, the questioning kept going long after the zip had gone. “Did you have classes today, ma’am? . . . When did you have classes last? . . . What classes did you have?” Nothing happened. The student’s comments were flat and Poundstone could do little with what responses were offered . . . but she kept at it.

Too often she had to wade through too many dull answers before getting one she could work with. In contrast, her standard observations generally were quite good, whether she was talking about cops on bikes (“If they catch a crook, where do they put ‘em? The handlebars?”) or mean-spirited people (“He was always too angry. He was like a big jugular vein.”)

But she never stuck with it long enough to set a tone.

Just an observation.

Warming up the Improv crowd was George McClure, a 33-year-old Denver comedian with a quiet, easy style. He confidently covered topics including love, divorce and Texas.

But his best line of the night came when he felt it necessary to explain his job to a man who questioned the accuracy of McClure’s material.

“This is not a documentary,” McClure clarified. “I lot of this stuff I just make up.”

Paula Poundstone will perform at the Improv, 832 Garnet Ave., Pacific Beach, through Sunday. George McClure opens. For more details, call the club at 483-4522.