For Paula Poundstone, attention deficit is like a performance-enhancing drug.

It allows her to weave from one subject to another, to another, finding funny wherever she goes.

She performed Thursday night at the Pikes Peak Center, taking on so-called “Tea Party” activists, anti-gay rights people and those unfortunate enough to find seats in the front row: not that unusual for comic subjectmatter.

But it was her style that made the biggest impression. She clearly has no script, and I wonder if she even has a vague structure in her mind of where she’s going. She just noodles around, with seeming blind faith that she’ll run into something funny if she keeps talking. … and she almost always did.

That freeform style found its sharpest focus when she took to the people in the first few rows of the audience. It always started with “And, sir, what do you do for a living?”

The first guy she pounced on said he ran a plumbing company. How long had he been doing plumbing?

“Twenty-five to 30 years.”

Well, that’s all Poundstone needed. She wondered how you could not quite know if it was 25 or 30 years, then she had fun with the fact that he did some of the jobs himself, and outsourced others to his two assistants. And what’s the name of his company?

“Do I have to say?” he asks.

So, of course, she starts calling his company “Do I Have to Say.”

And what comic gold she couldn’t mine from the minutia of the plumber’s work, she found in a nearby man who does marketing for Christian youth properties, to rent them on the off seasons.

You can imagine the fun she had with that one.

AND ANOTHER TAKE:

Gazette free-lancer Kate Jonuska was at the show, too, and offers her review as well:

Paula Poundstone gets a dose of Colorado Springs. And vice versa.

By Kate Jonuska

Some people would be surprised at how much applause a Colorado Springs audience can muster when a comedian blatantly proclaims her atheism, supports gay marriage and labels anti-Obama “tea parties” as “nuttery.” But those people apparently weren’t at the Paula Poundstone performance Thursday night at the Pikes Peak Center — or, at least, weren’t there happily or perhaps for very long.

With her signature laid-back style — she actually laid on the stage and propped her feet on a stool at one point — Poundstone’s stand up seemed to wander wherever her mind did, from camping trips with her daughter and the obstinacy of teenage son to Obama’s “controversial” address to school children. (Stay in school, work hard and wash your hands was the message, the same message she’s repeated to her kids over and over. “Let him be the one to go blue in the face,” she says.)

Perhaps Poundstone finally realized where she was when during her popular audience interaction, she met a (totally good sport) marketer for a ministry, or rather, for the ministry’s camp properties. She managed to banter with him amicably — and quite humorously — without once insulting or denigrating religion or religious people, though the marketer’s job description may have taken a good-natured ribbing.

Sneezing and coughing some, battling her allergies, Poundstone did have some excellent homeland security advice. With all the worry, both real and paranoid, about the swine flu, just go ahead and sneeze on terror suspects. That will scare them.