Who Knew?“The comic Paul Mecurio, who handles warming up the crowd at New York studio tapings, performs the same duty here. His shtick is built around stereotypes—point at someone in the crowd and say “I bet you’re a lawyer/student/plumber.” These essentialist gags don’t play so well in do-gooder country. Mercurio asks a guy in the back of the theater if he’s a sociologist. “No,” he says. “I’m a bus driver for Metro Transit.”
With complete unpredictability, the crowd goes crazy. Like an experiment in group psychology, they won’t stop cheering.
The perplexed comic asks if he’s missing a joke. The crowd screams more. Someone yells something about the working class. The New York comic is nonplussed. He flees from the stage.
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