Paula Poundstone, a stand-up comedian, emerged alongside several other women—including Roseanne Barr, Ellen DeGeneres, Judy Tenuta, and Rita Rudner—during the surge of female comics in the late 1980s. Her television career thrived through the following decade until a startling legal accusation in 2001 placed her professional future in jeopardy. Born on December 29, 1959, in Huntsville, Alabama, she secured her initial breakthrough in the mid-1980s through multiple appearances on HBO comedy specials. By the start of the 1990s she shifted her primary attention toward television, earning a CableAce Award for Best Stand Up Special in 1992 for the program Cats, Cops, and Stuff and receiving another the next year for Best Program Interviewer on the short-lived series The Paula Poundstone Show. She supplied backstage commentary during the 1993 Emmy Awards broadcast, nearly eclipsed the main proceedings at the pre- and post-ceremonies for the 1994 Academy Awards, and acted as an official correspondent for The Tonight Show throughout the 1992 presidential campaign. In the late 1990s she joined the cast of Hollywood Squares. Beyond performing, she produced and narrated the award-winning children’s audiobook collection Completely Yours, which included the foster-parenting tale “A Mother for Choco,” a subject drawn from her own experience in that role. In June 2001 authorities arrested her on allegations of committing lewd acts on a girl under age 14 and endangering two additional girls and two boys. Soon afterward she entered a rehabilitation facility for alcoholism, and in September she entered a no-contest plea to the lesser counts of one felony charge of child endangerment and one misdemeanor charge of inflicting injury on a child once prosecutors dismissed the original accusations.
