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‘‘That’s not me.”

You won’t find him in tights on the Internet, but the Providence, R.I., native certainly has guts. Fifteen years ago, when he was a Wall Street lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions, Mecurio approached Jay Leno at a private client function.

‘‘I said, ‘I don’t know if you buy jokes, but here’s a bunch of jokes,’” the funnyman remembers. ‘‘I was a nervous wreck — I forgot to put my name and number on the jokes – but I figured I had nothing to lose.”

The gamble paid off; Leno started telling Mecurio’s jokes on ‘‘The Tonight Show” and the rest is, well, not so much history as the story of a deeply conflicted and indecisive individual.

‘‘I was living this secret double life,” Mecurio says earnestly, ‘‘where I was a lawyer and investment banker by day and a stand up comic by night.”

Blood, Brooks Brothers

True story: Middle class kid from Providence, R.I., graduates with honors from Georgetown University Law Center and launches a career as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer on Wall Street.

‘‘My parent were, like, middle class,” he explains. ‘‘I ‘made it.’”

But Mecurio had a secret dream that no amount of success in the world of corporate law could satisfy. Spurred on by Leno’s encouragement — ‘‘It was really powerful,” he admits — the young associate led a life that sounds rather like the sitcom he’s currently pitching.

‘‘I worked this club called Downtown Beirut II on the Bowery,” he says, referring to the notoriously seedy strip near Manhattan’s Lower East Side. ‘‘You sit around and wait to do five minutes of standup.

‘‘I was changing in the cab – taking my suit jacket off, and my tie ... it was like changing into Superman.”

One night, ducking away from the office to do a routine, Mecurio found himself heckled by the comic who’d performed before him, a guy who just happened to have sustained a fresh knife injury in the neck.

‘‘’I always wanted to follow a slashing,’” Mecurio had joked. After that, there was bad blood — literally.

‘‘I stayed onstage and kept doing my jokes,” Mecurio says. ‘‘I was scared to death he was trying to kill me.”

Slipping back into the office at 11 p.m. was tough – a senior partner was ‘‘still there, livid” — and Mecurio’s Brook Brothers shirt was bloodstained, but somehow he managed to keep both lives separate.

‘‘I didn’t want Wall Street to know I was a comic, and I didn’t want comics to know I was on Wall Street,” he sighs. Mecurio has a compelling way with a narrative, that’s for sure. ‘‘Lewis Black, who was a friend of mine from the clubs, said, ‘You have a sitcom here.’”

Diver down

The Lewis Black thing led to the Jon Stewart thing. In 1996, Mecurio was part of the original writing team for ‘‘The Daily Show” on Comedy Central. His work there earned him an Emmy, a Peabody and the goodwill of his poor mother, who thought if he couldn’t be a Master of the Universe on Wall Street, he might at least come back to Providence and run the family business — a furniture store — after his dad died.

The funny parts come before that, though. Mecurio describes his on-again, off-again relationship with the world of Wall Street before his Comedy Central dreams came true.

‘‘In 1993, I sold everything and moved to a rooming house in New Rochelle,” he says. ‘‘It was like a halfway house, with ex-cons and recovering addicts ... you know those Phillip Marlowe movies where they find the bad guy in the rooming house?

‘‘Like that.”

The IRS audit was rough: ‘‘One year I’m making all this money; next year, nothing,” he laughs. ‘‘They thought I was hiding it somewhere.”

He held onto one last trapping of success – but not for long. The rising waters of the Long Island Sound engulfed his Saab 900 — ‘‘There were whitecaps in the back seat” – and the tow truck operator had to call in the roadside assistance equivalent of Navy SEALS.

‘‘When you have car trouble,” he drawls, ‘‘the last words you want to hear are ‘professional divers.’”

Juggernaut

Comedy’s a fickle mistress — that seems to be the theme behind Mecurio’s zigzagging career trajectory in the early ’90s. Living in the rooming house equivalent of a van down by the river, he waffled: ‘‘I thought I had my dream but I didn’t. I was torn.

‘‘I moved back in to the city and swore off standup.”

Job — check. Apartment — check. Girlfriend — check. He started doing comedy again — ‘‘like a junkie I couldn’t stop” — and six months later at a mergers and acquisitions meeting in Arizona, someone called him out: ‘‘Didn’t I see you on TV last night?”

Mecurio says, ‘‘All these stuffed shirt New York lawyers and invest bankers were looking at me. They didn’t know how to react.

‘‘I left and never looked back.”

And that’s when it all came together: the steady work, the awards, and the stints warming up the audience and appearing as a faux correspondent.

‘‘This juggernaut,” Mecurio calls ‘‘The Daily Show.”

So what’s Jon Stewart really like? Is he as dreamy as he appears on TV?

‘‘Oh, he’s a great guy, a sweet guy,” Mecurio enthuses. ‘‘I mean — you know he’s only three feet tall, right? He’s like a little circus freak.”

Not really — just when he wears the tights.

Paul Mecurio performs at 8 p.m. Sunday in The Music Center at Strathmore, 5301 Tuckerman Lane, North Bethesda. For tickets, $32.75 to $37.75, call 202-432-7328 or visit www.ticketmaster.com.