When Paula Poundstone was a fledgling comic living in a boarding house on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, she had a trick for retrieving snippets of possible jokes that filtered through her mind at bedtime.

“I would lay down at night exhausted from the long day and … then I’d think of something that might be a joke or a topic to investigate,” she says.

But that would involve getting out of bed, grabbing a pen and jotting down a note every time inspiration struck awake or asleep.

Instead, Poundstone came up with a new strategy. As soon as a wisp of a comic thought went through her mind, she’d reach under the bed, grab the phone book and toss it in the middle of the floor and then go back to sleep.

When she got up in the morning and saw the familiar object, she’d be prompted to recall any useful treads.

“Which, by the way, probably worked 50 percent of the time,” she says, admitting that sometimes she had already forgotten what it was she was trying to remember.

Poundstone has come a long way in the past three decades.

Her well-honed, wry sense of humor peppers everything from a podcast with co-host Adam Felber (“Nobody Listens to Paula Poundstone”), books (including “There’s Nothing in Here That I Meant to Say”), comedy specials (such as “Cats, Cops and Stuff” on HBO), countless tours and regular guest stints on the panel for NPR’s news quiz show “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.”

Her observational humor comes in a delivery that winds back and forth between quick quips and meandering side trips.

She’s a familiar face to New Hampshire audiences. Her next tour stops are at the Colonial Theatre in Keene at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 2, and the Lebanon Opera House at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 6.

“I have an unending tour (schedule). “Sometimes it’s really grueling. I don’t have any off days,” she says of being involved in many projects.

It’s why she usually has a notebook tucked into her back pocket and a pen that clips to her belt loop. It comes in handy whenever she needs to put pen to paper in her waking hours.

“Ideas don’t grow on trees,” she says with mock seriousness.

But memories, good and bad, have a way of imprinting themselves for life.

Take the 1975 movie “Jaws.” It still has teeth.

Poundstone didn’t see it until after she graduated from high school, but it left a mark, though it didn’t stop her from going into the water.

“Even though I know it wasn’t real, that it was a robot, as soon as my feet can’t touch the bottom anymore, I start hearing ‘duh duh duh duh’ (from composer John Williams’ winning soundtrack). The brass instrument that careens upward, building up the tension as the shark heads toward prey, doesn’t help.

One of her kids had a similar reaction after he lobbied to see “Jaws” on DVD while they were at a family friend’s house.

“He never got over it. He became a beach comber.”

“Jurassic Park” didn’t land well either.

“He was OK until those velociraptors could open the doorknob,” she said. “Those were the days, my friend.”

These days, Poundstone has seven cats and cuddles up at night with two big dogs — a golden retriever and Newfoundland mix and the other partly a German Shepherd — at night on top of a sheet and beneath a comforter.

Even since she was a high schooler she’s found sleeping on the floor preferable to a bed.

“When I’m in a hotel, I sleep on the bed, because you don’t know where that floor has been. But at home I’m pretty happy down there on the (wooden) floor. Then when I get up, I fold the blanket and put it in a box, and my room is miraculously transformed into my office.

Though having shedding pets requires regular vacuuming, Poundstone says it’s her brain that’s more like a Roomba.

It’s always going round and round looking for that next tuft of a joke.