Poundstone thrives on ‘free-range’ comedy flair Benefit show Saturday at Bar Harbor venue

Paula Poundstone is various things to different people: author, radio personality, single mother of three, a recovering alcoholic touched by scandal and, most of all, an award-winning stand-up comedian.

Many facets of the Massachusetts native will be on display when she performs at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Criterion Theatre in Bar Harbor. Proceeds from the show will benefit The Maine Lighthouse Corp., which advocates for comprehensive addiction treatment in Maine.

An Emmy Award winner, Poundstone, 47, also was the first woman to receive a cable ACE award for best stand-up comedy special and also won an American Comedy Award for funniest comedienne. A regular on NPR’s “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” she also wrote her autobiography, “There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say,” which came out last year.

But upheaval came into her flourishing career in 2001, when Poundstone pleaded guilty to charges of felony child endangerment and misdemeanor inflicting injury on a child. Few details were released, but the then-prosecutor indicated that the charges were a result of an incident in which she was driving her children while intoxicated. Poundstone was sentenced to five years probation and 180 days in an alcohol rehabilitation program. After completion of the program, she was granted full custody of her adopted children.

Even this dark time in her life has become part of Poundstone’s stand-up act: “I did have a drinking problem. I don’t know if you heard. It was kind of kept hush-hush out of deference to me: I was actually court-ordered to Alcoholics Anonymous on television. That pretty much blows the hell out of the second ‘A,’ wouldn’t you say?”

It’s only natural that the scandal would end up in her act, Poundstone said in an interview from her California home.

“I don’t consciously decide what to talk about,” she said. “It’s that which comes to me in the course of the day. My act is autobiographical, so I couldn’t have not talked about it. It wouldn’t make sense not to. I do expect that I’ll talk about it less as time passes.”

Talking helped her get through that period of her life.

“For me, when I was in the worst part of my life, more than one famous person came up to me and said, ‘Seriously, you know what I did once?’ The gift of that is realizing that I don’t have to be a perfect human being.”

An adoptive mother to 16-year-old Toshia, 13-year-old Allison and 9-year-old Thomas, Poundstone also includes parenting in her act: “I’ve never found a job harder than parenting, partly because there are so many self-appointed experts. Even when something goes right, I’m sure I did it wrong. One day, Thomas had a huge tantrum while we were walking to school, and Alley looked at me and said, ‘He didn’t get that way by himself.'”

What’s her secret for parenting from the road? “A shoebox with holes in it. No, really, I always feel like I should be doing one thing when I’m doing another. I’m on the road about eight days a month, so I’ll take the books we’re reading with me and read to them over the phone. I’ve had the same nanny for 13 years, and that’s so helpful. When I’m home, I’m really, really home, and I don’t do work stuff.”

Poundstone’s act is relatively clean, compared to many out there.

“Onstage, as in real life, I use words that wouldn’t be on network TV,” she admitted. “I don’t talk about graphically sexual things, because I don’t have a lot of sex. My experience was years ago, and I think the way they do things have changed since then.”

Poundstone and her children share a home with nine cats, a dog, a bearded dragon lizard, an elderly bunny and one doggedly determined ant left from her ant farm.

A large component of Poundstone’s act is interacting with the crowd. That comes from her earliest days as a Boston comic, when she took the stage and immediately forgot her carefully rehearsed act. So she targeted an audience member and asked, “What do you do?”

“I do a lot of just feeling my way,” she said. “There’s different energy and feeling different nights. I’m hugely influenced by the people in front of me. An energetic, fun crowd makes a huge difference. There’s a magic that comes from people being in a room together, and I like to extract as much of that as I can.”

So any night, a good portion of Poundstone’s act will be improvised.

“My chickens have to be free-range,” she said. “The minute I try to organize things, I can’t do it.”