By Nick A. Zaino III Globe correspondent,Updated March 22, 2022, 4:29 p.m.
If Paul Mecurio happens to call you out of the audience this weekend at Off Cabot, the new comedy club in Beverly, you don’t need to worry. He’s not going to make fun of your shirt or your job or make you the butt of the joke. He wants to hear your story, and he’s got a particular skill for drawing it out, something he’s honed on club and theater stages and from warming up crowds at tapings of “The Daily Show” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“I just like to talk to people and then see where it goes,” he says, speaking by Zoom. “And then it sometimes might feed me into something that I want to do, that I had planned to talk about.”
In addition to appearing on camera in sketches, Mecurio’s job at “The Late Show” is to welcome the audience into the Ed Sullivan Theater and get them ready to see the show. He sees himself as a host and the crowd as his house guests. Mecurio explains the ground rules, the most important of which is that the audience can’t be passive like they would be at home in front of their televisions.
Read full article here: From ‘Colbert’ to the clubs, Paul Mecurio is the chattiest comic you might ever meet
