Paul Mecurio. (Photo courtesy EverestPR)
“If the gays can afford to attend White Party Bangkok, they can definitely afford a ticket to ‘Permission to Speak!’”
So says Paul Mecurio — the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning comedian, actor and writer best known for his work on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”— here in his first LGBTQ+ media interview. He brings his unique one-man off-Broadway show “Permission to Speak” to the Dr. Phillips Center’s Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater Jan. 18 at 7:30 p.m.
Mecurio has one of the most diverse resumes you’ll likely ever find. After graduating from Georgetown Law School, Mecurio worked as a Wall Street mergers and acquisitions lawyer and as an investment banker, brokering multi-billion-dollar deals. As if that wasn’t enough, he’d moonlight as a comedy writer and stand-up comic.
Eventually turning to entertainment full-time, Mecurio became one of the original writers for “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Now, performing as the warm-up act for each night’s taping of “The Late Show,” he interviews audience members on stage, making them the star of his set.
“It was always unnatural for me to just go on stage and start launching into jokes, so I would talk to audiences,” Mecurio says. “I would do your initial crowd work, which is what a lot of comedians do: I talk to you about your hat, but I don’t give a shit about your hat. I’m talking to you about your hat, because I have a joke about a hat, and I wanna make it look like it came off the top of my head. It’s all artifice.”
Born with a gift for gab, Mecurio developed his interviewing skills as a 12-year-old salesman in his parents’ Providence, R. I. furniture store. That natural curiosity in people and their backgrounds has become the backbone of “Permission to Speak.”
“I know it seems pretty basic, and it is,” Mecurio says, “But what you get out of it has been really quite special. The premise is that everybody has a story; it’s super cliché, but it’s also very true. If you just talk to people, and they know you’re not going to compromise them and be mean, they’ll give you the world.
“You get to that third or fourth question … and that’s where you find gold,” he continues. “There’s an emotional intimacy that happens when you really talk to people.”
With its audience-focused format, “Permission to Speak” can even be therapeutic. Mecurio says his show has been called “a giant, fun, group therapy session” on more than one occasion.
“Some people want to tell their story, and some people need to tell their story,” he says. “I think especially today, people feel not heard. Particularly in the gay community, in the transgender community.”
Mecurio shares what has been described as “a perfect clip,” and one of his proudest moments, of the show. In it, an audience member who’s just admitted to being “super gay” shares how in his work as an investment banker, he has to “come out” every day:
“I worked in investment banking on Wall Street; it’s a very macho thing,” Mecurio says. “That’s like being a gay guy in an NFL locker room. It’s all about this big, swinging dick stuff. I like talking with gay people, because I always empathize and am fascinated by how … they’re in the closet and how you keep that thing a secret. I give them a lot of credit.”
Though “Permission to Speak” isn’t about politics, Mecurio believes his show is one route to help Americans get back to a place where people of opposing political views can talk.
“You first have to acknowledge that we’re human beings, in the same boat. What I’m trying to do is get everybody to feel like they kind of know each other for a few minutes,” he explains. “The premise is that we’re nameless, faceless, disconnected and divisive. But if we get together and share stories, we realize we have more in common than we think.”
As for those stories, just when you think Mecurio has probably heard them all, he knows he hasn’t. Those stories have included a man whose wife left him for a “fat, septic tank” of a Lithuanian priest; two heroin addicts — one recovering; the other still using because she liked it too much — and a transgender doctor whose heart condition only allowed him to transition socially.
“The stories coming out of real people’s mouths are, by far, way more interesting, and way more like ‘Holy Shit’ moments, than anything we could conjure up in a writers’ room,” Mecurio says.
But if the allure of getting to know more about the people in your neighborhood isn’t enough for someone in the LGBTQ+ community to come see his show, Mecurio has one last selling point.
“Well…,” Mecurio says, “I have very full lips; men do find me kinda cute.
“My lips were always big,” he continues. “They used to call me ‘Fish Lips,’ and I hated them, and I would get in fights over them, because kids were nasty. One guy used to call me ‘Sugar Bowl.’ I was a swimmer, and I would get my head shaved. He said my lips were so big they looked like the handles on a sugar bowl. But I gotta tell ya, some of the men in the gay community find me quite attractive… the lips, anyways.
“You’re lucky this is an audio, and not a video call,” he adds, “because you could get mesmerized by my lips.”
Paul Mecurio’s “Permission to Speak” comes to Orlando’s Alexis & Jim Pugh Theater at the Dr. Phillips Center Jan. 18, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $45 and are available at DrPhillipsCenter.org.
