'Fitness guru,' comedian Poundstone returns to Tucson to make up lost 2020 date

When the gyms closed during the height of the pandemic in 2020, comedian Paula Poundstone was almost a first-degree black belt in taekwondo.

“For years I’ve taken taekwondo and self defense — and by the way, I couldn’t do either in a pinch — but when this thing happened, I was like, uh-oh, I’m really going to go to seed during this period,” she said.

So she shifted gears and set a new workout goal that didn’t require a gym: do real pushups. The kind of pushup that doesn’t start from the knees. Full-body “mature person” pushups.

The 61-year-old comedian, who is performing at Fox Tucson Theatre on Thursday, Oct. 28, started slow: 10 pushups from her knees, twice a day until she built enough strength to go full-body. Every week she added a pushup to the sets.

She chronicled her progress on Twitter and somewhere along the line fitness trainers started chiming in with advice. And then someone tweeted a challenge: For every “real” pushup Poundstone did, they would do five.

“That first time, I did three. And now, I do 30, twice a day, real pushups,” Poundstone all-but gushed.

But when someone on Twitter posted that “Paula Poundstone becoming a fitness guru wasn’t on my bingo card,” Poundstone had to laugh.

“I think a fitness guru may be a slight exaggeration,” she said with her signature nasally giggle.

When she hits the Fox stage on Thursday, she might just show off her newfound upper body strength and ripped abs.

Ok, that might also be a slight exaggeration.

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Her Fox concert is a makeup from her 2020 Tucson date that was canceled due to the pandemic. Many of Poundstone’s shows from last summer and through the year have been make-up dates from COVID-canceled shows, she said.

Poundstone was in Aspen, Colorado, in March 2020 when the country went into lockdown. Her show was canceled and she recalled being at the airport “and it was like you could hear a pin drop, it was so quiet.”

At first, she thought the pandemic would blow over in a few weeks and life would resume uninterrupted.

“And then the writing began to form on the wall that I was out of a job,” she said, then murmured: “That comes with some burden.”

Poundstone pivoted to online, boosting her “Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone” podcast, launching a series of goofy Sunday night virtual game shows and, as the 2020 election campaign heated up, creating a minipodcast called “French President Trump.”

“My friends played the press and I was French President Trump,” she said of the short-lived series. “I can’t do a Trump impression, but I can do a really bogus French accent.”

“I certainly wasn’t making a living, but I was stemming the tide of loss,” she said of those efforts, which featured a virtual tip jar if anyone was so inclined to tip her.

She also spent her days caring for her pets — 10 cats and two dogs including her golden retriever Moe, who is enamored with tennis balls.

The mention of Moe and the tennis balls reminded Poundstone of a story about a dog that walked out into rush-hour traffic to stop a car and get help for his owner, who had collapsed during their walk.

“If I had a seizure while I was walking my dog Moe, she would drop a tennis ball on my flailing chest,” Poundstone said. “She doesn’t care about me. I am only the source of the tennis ball.”