Paul Mecurio

5 Questions with Paul Mecurio

November 30, 2007 | San Francisco Comedy, Interviews by Chad Lehrman

Paul Mecurio left his job on Wall Street to pursue a career in comedy, winning an Emmy award for his writing on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He is currently traveling as the opening act for Brian Regan, with stops at the Masonic Auditorium in SF on December 6th and the Wells Fargo Center in Santa Rosa on December 7th.

How did you get this gig opening for Brian Regan? Have you guys worked together before?

I have pictures of him in compromising positions. No, we've worked together. I was his opening act at Caroline's in New York and we kind of hit it off. I work clean, he works clean, and that's important to him. He has kind of a different take on things than I do, but I complement what he does I think. And it's a real honor to work for him cause he's a great guy and he's one of the best comics in the country.

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When you started at the Daily Show, did ever you think the show would last this long?

No, absolutely not. I had to be talked into taking the job. I took it, but I figured it would last a few months, like most jobs in TV, and then get cancelled. Fairly early on, the critics liked it, cause we were kind of taking no prisoners, and that was because a lot of the people working on it hadn't worked in TV before. There were no preconceived rules and notions about what you could or couldn't do. Then there was this sort of, slow grass-roots movement where it started to get a little bit of a cult following. The web wasn't what it is now, so it didn't really spread that way. It just kind of took off and then in 2000 with the debacle in Florida, that sort of put us on the map. The show happened to be built to cover that kind of long-running news story perfectly- having correspondents that you put in the field, analysis in the studio- it just lent itself to that. In the beginning, I literally thought it would last a few months and then get cancelled. After a year, you could kind of start to see that this was something, and it just made sense to stick around and be a part of it.

How did the show change when it switched from Craig Kilborn to Jon Stewart?

We smoke a lot more weed with Jon Stewart. Before it was pretty much ecstasy the whole time, so that was the big adjustment. No, with Jon- I think the show at its core is still the same, but Jon really made the focus what it is. It used to focus on politics but also on pop culture and music and stuff like that. It sort of had a broader hit, the areas of our culture that we would focus on. He narrowed it to really focus on politics and government and world leaders- how they behave around the world, that kind of thing. He made the show so much stronger because of that. Just honing the point of view of the show. He's very much about, "what's the point of view of the joke? What are we trying to say? We need to say something with our jokes." We were doing that before he got there, but he improved it tremendously.

You do a LOT of crowd work- is that how you got the gig as warm-up act (on the Daily Show) or did you develop those skills by doing the warm-up act?

I actually developed them by doing the warm-up act. Cause it's really hard to do material in that situation. The warm-up act came about completely by happenstance. The first month or so on the Daily Show, we didn't have an audience. We wanted to be a pure news parody. If you go back and look at the very first shows, you just hear a bunch of staffers cackling in the background. But the network said "look, we need to have people laughing at the comedy." So what ended up happening was we got an audience, and the first night, one of the producers, Lizz Winstead said, "oh my God, we have an audience, but we don't have anybody to warm them up, I totally forgot about that." So she came in and she asked a few of us who were stand-ups, "Do you want to warm them up? We'll pay you a little something." And I was like, "yeah, if there's money involved, sure." It's hard to do stand-up in a studio, you have to do warm-up. You're really like an in-studio host, telling them what they need to do, why they're there, and get them relaxed and laughing. The best way to do that is to just talk to them in a real way. And I had always been pretty good at that in the clubs. Cause when you start out you have to emcee, and when you emcee in a club, you don't really immediately start doing your jokes. People are being seated or they're ordering drinks, so there's no focus in the room. You kind of kill a little time by talking to people, and then you eventually go into your act. So those things, they're kind of a natural output of that. And a lot of people said it's a little more unique, the way I do it. Cause I'm not just saying "what do you do? where are you from?" I'm really trying to have a conversation with some people and then tie all the conversations together.

Do you do that when you open for Brian Regan?

Yeah, I actually like to do it in a theater cause they're not expecting it. I'll jump off the stage and I'll run up into the crowd and talk to people with the spotlight. I don't do it for my whole set, just the beginning. But it's the same principle. People are still being seated and the focus isn't quite there. When you're sitting in a theater and people come in and get seated in front of you or even around you, for about the next 20 to 30 seconds, all those people lose focus. Cause they watch those people sitting down. And when they lose focus, my joke dies. There's a reason that comedy is done in the dark and there's one light on the performer; because all the focus has to be on the spoken word. It's not like a band where there's all this flash. It has to be very focused, and the least little thing can lose a person's focus. So in those opening moments, you really want to get them all together so you kind of ease them into your material. So yeah I'll talk to them in the theater and mess around with them a little bit. And they really like it because they don't expect it in the theater. So it's a way to make a big theater feel intimate by doing that. They're there to see Brian, but I want them to feel like they got a little cherry on the top, like "hey that guy was funny, that was a nice added surprise."