Comedian Paula Poundstone refuses to research Provincetown before she performs at Town Hall on Aug. 16. That would require the E-word, she says: “Effort.” She’s also been here before.

“I do the time-honored ‘Where are you from? What do you do for a living?,’ and the town often comes up in those conversations,” she says. “My favorite part is talking to the audience.”

Poundstone, who grew up in Sudbury, has been riffing with crowds since her first open mic night in Boston in 1979. She has since released the award-winning HBO special Cats, Cops, and Stuff, appeared regularly on NPR’s weekly quiz show Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, and toured theaters across the country.

Her first time in Provincetown was neither glamorous nor queer: she came as a babysitter for her neighbor’s children as a freshman in high school. She later returned with her church youth group, camping along the bike trail while chaperones kept the teens away from Commercial Street. She has come back a handful of times, mainly for work.

“It’s a great place, and it’s hard to describe to people who haven’t been here,” she says. “My favorite part is the guy with the big, big bouffant hairdo and bikini who rides around on his bicycle.”

Whether she’s performing in Lincoln, N.H., East Greenwich, R.I., or Skokie, Ill. — all stops on her current tour — Poundstone regards her shows as “one-sided conversations” with her audience. She calls it a “muscle” she has developed over 40 years, adding that she almost never has trouble finding the absurdity in a fan’s daily routine.

“In all these years, there’s just a handful of times where I’ve said, ‘What do you do for a living?’ and they’ve said, ‘I’m a software developer,’ ” she says. “Then I tend to glaze over. I just give them a dull, blank stare.”

She reserves something more than a dull, blank stare for the Trump administration, whose rightward lurch has inspired her to develop wild theories about “how the hell we got here” as a country. She has blamed automatic paper towel dispensers, kale, and pharmaceutical ads for pushing us in a “very, very desperately bad direction,” though she admits to the Independent that she’s still gathering evidence.

“If it were obvious, we would’ve fixed it by now,” she said. “It’s got to be in the realm of the non-obvious. This is why I really think that kale has something to do with it. Maybe there isn’t a mad professor designing kale to steer us toward fascism, but it’s a possibility.”

Since 2008, Poundstone has served as a spokesperson for United for Libraries, a Bryn-Mawr-based arm of the American Library Association that raises funds for local libraries. She performed at the group’s annual conference in June, hoping to play even a small part in “lifting their spirits,” she says, “so they could spit on their hands and go back into the battle.

“When I ask somebody in the audience, ‘What do you do for a living?’ I already know the answer: they’re a librarian,” she says. “But it just feels good entertaining them, because you’re sitting in a room full of heroes.”

Librarians are not immune from her pointed questions at these events. Poundstone says she has asked “many times” why the Dewey Decimal System is so controversial, but no one can give her an answer.

“I don’t know why, but it’s the sort of thing they get hung up on,” she says. “This is why we can’t do away with public broadcasting, because we need PBS or NPR to be out there with investigative journalism on the Dewey Decimal System.”

When she isn’t lifting others’ spirits, Poundstone lifts her own by running what she calls “the funniest worm farm in the country” in her California back yard. She gathers leftover food from a local food bank and feeds the remains to her worms, housed in four bins.

“One time, I tried to put everything in a blender because I thought it would break down better,” she says. “You should’ve seen the broccoli in my hair: hours and hours of work.”

She lovingly refers to her worms as “the best-fed worms in the world,” and she says anyone can order their waste for $4 per pound plus shipping.

“You can hear them when you open the bin,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s eating you’re hearing or slithering, but it’s kind of exciting. Who ever heard an earthworm before? Maybe I’ll get a powerful mic and drop it down into my worm bin.”

Asked the same question she puts to strangers, she pauses.

“I don’t know whether to describe myself as a comic who’s a worm farmer or a worm farmer who’s a comic.”

 

Payomet Road Show

The event: Paula Poundstone
The time: Saturday, Aug. 16, 7 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Town Hall, 260 Commercial St.
The cost: $45 to $68 at payomet.org