Paula Poundstone on going viral, honing your funny and Baltimore birds

I staunchly believe that almost everybody has a Baltimore story, whether it happened to you, your brother, your boss’s wife or that girl you went to college with who played a waitress on “The Wire” that time.

So when I spoke to Paula Poundstone recently, I asked if she had any fun memories of the area, a question I pose to most of the celebrities I chat with. I figured she’d tell me about long-ago evenings in some gritty club on the circuit when she was coming up in the comedy game. Her Baltimore story does, indeed, include a little grit, but not the kind you’d expect.

“I used to work at a club on Water Street, and while working there, me and the middle act were gonna go out — maybe go to do those paddle thingies, the ones you do with your feet,” said the veteran funny woman, who appears Thursday at the Senator Theatre. “I just stepped out of the hotel, and a bird pooped on my head. I was like, ‘Now I can go back upstairs.’ Yeah. I’ll never forget Baltimore.”

The city sure does leave a mark on you, huh? I’m sorry, I’ll leave the standup to the professionals.

Known for her wry observational humor, Poundstone has been a comedy staple for decades, from making the late-night show rounds to successful HBO specials and the honor of being the first woman to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (the less said about this year’s upcoming event, the better).

Through it all, the comic, who is host of the podcast “Nobody Listens To Paula Poundstone” and a panelist for NPR’s “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!,” remains a natural — and naturally funny — commentator on the absurdities and truths of the human condition.

“My act is largely autobiographical, talking about what I am thinking about,” Poundstone said. “When I had kids, I talked about raising kids, and I might make a couple of jokes about them now that they’re young adults, but that’s theirs and not mine. I’m in a different phase of life. There was a point in my early career where I felt like I needed to have some sort of hook. I did away with that, thank goodness.”

The nature of comedy and entertainment has changed so much since she started out in the late 1970s. I interviewed her more than a decade ago for another publication at the beginning of the viral video craze. At the time, Poundstone said she hadn’t had luck getting any of her funny little shorts, many featuring her cats, to take off.

“It was a daily slog. I was stuck on these silly stupid videos. I think back then, it was before you could do stuff with your phone,” she said. “I used a real camera. I labored over them, did everything myself, with costumes and wigs. I wanted one of them to get its day in the sun, and now I just hold the phone up and throw it up on the internet.”

Indeed, there was no video option back in 1979, when Poundstone was practicing her early career five-minute routine while busing tables every night. “If you looked carefully, you could see my lips moving for five minutes,” she said.

She was so engrossed in her act while getting dressed in the restroom of the rooming house she lived in, “thinking and thinking about it, that I looked down and realized I’d put on my jeans and pulled my underwear up over them, in the wrong order. I was that far gone in anxiety and concentration.”

Still, there’s no substitution for getting up on that stage. “What makes someone a good comic is stage time, open mics, learning how to do it,” she said. “If you want to ski, you can watch a lot of videos where some woman can tell you about skiing and can talk you through it. But to get good, you have to put some sticks on the ground, put on the heavy boots, and you have to do it over and over again.”

Right now, she’s still making people laugh onstage in front of a live audience, but others get to laugh along from home, too. For years, Poundstone has been a panelist on “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!,” the weekly news quiz where host Peter Sagal runs a panel of professional funny people through the happenings of the day. “It’s really fun. The show is edited, and Peter is always chastising me,” she said. “It’s much longer when I’m there. I don’t really edit myself.”

Between the podcast, the show and her live gigs, Poundstone knows that the editing and strict focus on her work that distracted her to the point she put her clothes on wrong was actually part of the problem.

“What I realized is that [concentration] was contributing to my anxiety,” she said. “The other thing is that the stuff I would say when I got nervous and forgot anything, that was the funniest stuff anyway.”