Paula Poundstone

Paula Poundstone was born in Huntsville, Alabama in 1959, though she grew up in Massachusetts. Poundstone dropped out of high school to pursue a career in show business. She started doing stand-up comedy in the late ‘70s at open-mic nights in Boston, and in the early 1980s, she moved to San Francisco, where she performed sets at a comedy club in the Haight Ashbury district. In the mid-1980s, Poundstone started appearing on talk shows. Her 1990 HBO special, Cats, Cops and Stuff, won her a CableACE Award, making her the first female comedian to win this distinction. In 2004, Comedy Central listed Poundstone at #88 in its list of the 100 greatest stand-ups of all time.