Sheck It Out!

A Lesson in Reading A Room

When I dropped off my briefcase in the upstairs green room at Caroline’s at the Seaport, I noticed a young woman applying body makeup to a lithe, handsome, dark-haired man in a Speedo.

I didn’t make much of it. The man introduced himself as Angel. He wasn’t someone I knew from the New York stand-up scene. He had come in for the audition about to take place downstairs. This was 1988, the height of the 80s Stand Up Comedy Boom. Club owners from around the country had organized the conference, which would culminate in a showcase featuring about fifteen comics doing five-minute sets each.

I was lucky. I had been given the number five slot in the lineup, a prime spot, early enough for the audience to be warmed up but not so late they’d be burned out.

I loved Caroline’s at the Seaport.* By that time in my career, I had worked all kinds of rooms. I had worked in college cafeterias. On ferry boats. I had worked in discos, banquet halls, conference rooms, restaurants, private apartments, sidewalks, and cornfields. You cannot underestimate how much the architecture of the venue influences how the audience responds.

The first thing I look for when I enter a new room is the height of the ceiling. Low ceiling, I know I have a chance. High ceiling? Gonna be tough. You could be the funniest person in the solar system, but if you’re standing on a box in a poorly lit room with a ceiling three stories high and an audience lounging on soft furniture, you’re going to bomb. You need the laughs to bounce off the ceiling back onto the crowd, not evaporate into the stratosphere.

That’s why the best rooms are dives, like the Comedy Cellar in the West Village that’s still going strong after decades. It’s literally a windowless basement packed with hard furniture. There is nowhere to focus but the stage. The laughter ricochets like machine gun bullets off the cramped ceiling and unadorned walls. While Caroline’s was no dive, it was a dark, intimate amphitheater with a low ceiling, perfect sight lines, and warm, focused lighting. Caroline Hirsch, the owner, had designed her room specifically for comedy.

In this room, you could kill, which was what I intended to do at this showcase.

I took a seat in the wings waiting to be introduced. The emcee, my friend, Angela Scott, stepped back onstage as the previous comedian exited to a nice round of applause. I glanced toward the back and noticed a group of other comics lined up against the wall in the shadows, observing. Many of us do that, especially for a high-stakes audition. You monitor the mood of the crowd as well as the other comics’ material to make sure you don’t repeat a premise. Or maybe you take note of a particular table or section that is either disruptive or laughing harder than the rest. If AI ever takes over the world, stand-up will be the last thing it conquers. I can’t imagine an algorithm that can account for all the variables that go into reading a room even before you step onstage. And once you’re on stage, you’re reading the room moment to moment.

Normally, a room full of industry professionals is a tough crowd. They’re working – assessing and critiquing – unlike an audience of civilians simply there to enjoy themselves. Despite that, this group seemed pretty receptive. I’m sure the comics loitering in the back envied my prime spot.

I rose to make my entrance when Angel’s girlfriend stepped directly in front of me holding a large American flag.

“Would you hold Angel’s flag?” she asked.

What? Who? Hold his flag? What is this woman talking about?

“Uh… no,” I sputtered. “I’m a comic. I’m about to go on.”

Then Angela – not to be confused with Angel – announced, “Please welcome, Angel Salazar!”

Wait? What? What’s going on?

The crowd applauded as Angel Salazar, wearing a sleeveless shirt and a bandanna on his head, holding a boombox on his shoulder, bounded onstage. Giving up on getting any help from me, his girlfriend hustled over and unfurled the American flag behind him. Angel shouted, “Sheck it out!” and began bobbing his head to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA.”

As I sank back into my seat, Angela came over and apologized . “They told me he was going on next. You’ll be after him.”

Okay…

Angel Salazar, who I had never seen before, was a “high-energy” act. On a regular show, the higher energy acts usually go last because they tend to be harder to follow. But Angel Salazar was more than just a high-energy act. Angel Salazar was a high-energy act with music, props, and a gimmick designed to destroy a crowd.

Angel Salazar was a stripper.

After pumping out “Born in the USA,” he dropped the boombox and instructed the audience to once again, “Sheck it out!”

Then he ripped off his shirt.

This crowd of presumably jaded comedy club owners screamed with delight.

I was astonished. And aghast.

He tore off his pants.

The crowd roared.

Now the full body makeup, which no stand-up comedian in human history ever needed, suddenly made sense.

Angel Salazar jumped onto a front row table.

“Sheck it out!” he shouted and yanked off his Speedo, sending a squeal of naughty glee through the audience. Under the Speedo was a tiny thong. Angel Salazar gyrated his crotch in the face of a female patron, a club owner I knew from Virginia.

The club owner threw her head back, eyes wide, mouth open, flabbergasted — and thrilled.

I glanced at the comics lined against the back wall. I could only make out their silhouettes, but I was sure each one of them was thinking, “I feel sorry for the poor son-of-a-bitch who’s gotta follow this guy.”

The crowd’s response to this “act” was visceral, not something that passed through their brains. It went right to their guts. Angel Salazar wasn’t doing jokes. He was scaring the audience, like a carny running a rollercoaster. They were shrieking with fright at being taken to the edge of — in this case — propriety.

For me, it wasn’t a roller coaster. It was a house of horrors.

No way was I going to be able to follow this frantic one-man pelvic thrusting Chippendale extravaganza. This crowd was not going to suddenly settle down and tune in to some observational monologist opining about the state of American culture. It’s not that I was a low-energy act. I didn’t hide behind a microphone delivering deadpan one-liners. I used my body, acted out bits, made funny faces. But I wouldn’t be hopping onto a table doing figure eights with my weenis in the face of a middle-aged woman I wasn’t married to.

I glanced at my watch as Angel Salazar was wrapping up and noticed he had done twelve minutes! Way past the allotted five. For a comedian, that’s a cardinal sin. We can appreciate someone killing in front of us. But going overtime? That’s just selfish and unprofessional. He had hijacked the showcase and pushed everyone’s spot back later into the evening, doing nothing more to earn his laughs than alarming the crowd with his threat to go full monty.#

Angela, the emcee, came over with a grave expression on her face as if consoling a mourner at a funeral. Sorry for your loss. “Want me to do some time?” she said, meaning she would do a few jokes before bringing me up in an attempt to settle and reorient the still-buzzing audience.

As if I were being fitted for a noose and just wanted to get it over with, I shook my head. “Bring me right up.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Steve Skrovan.”

I walked, unhurried, onstage.

The crowd was still crawling out from under the rubble of Angel Salazar’s shock and awe campaign. I gazed over their heads to the silhouettes of my fellow comics leaning against the back wall. Not a single one of them had moved. They all wanted to see how badly I was going to eat it. I was to be the sacrificial lamb, the five-minute buffer that allows the audience to catch their breath before the next act.

I had an idea of how I might handle this. But not until I stepped to the mic and scanned the faces in the audience did I give myself permission to do it.

The crowd quieted. They knew well this was a hard act to follow. I turned to the side of the stage where Angel Salazar was still gathering his props and sorting his laundry.

“Nice to be here at the Angel Salazar show,” I said.

Polite chuckle.

Then, I committed to the course of action that had occurred to me only moments before.

“I didn’t think I was going to have to do this,” I said with a sigh, “but check it out.”

I removed my sport coat.

The audience started laughing.

Is he really going to do doing this?

However, instead of rakishly tossing my coat away, I neatly folded it and placed it on the floor behind me.

Okay, they must have thought. He made his point. Now he’ll do his little jokes.

“Check it out,” I sighed again, my tone even, matter of fact, with a slight hint of apology as if to say I don’t like this any more than you do, but it has to be done.

I started unbuttoning my shirt.

The laughter intensified as I slowly made my way to my belt buckle. I folded the shirt and placed it on top of the coat as if I were unpacking on a trip.

“Check it out.”

I unzipped my pants.

Now, the crowd was roaring as I, in the most unsexy way possible, pulled down my jeans and struggled out of my basketball sneakers, once again neatly folding and stacking.

This left me onstage wearing nothing more than standard issue white briefs, sweat socks, and a watch, like a fresh recruit standing for inspection in Full Metal Jacket. Flashbulbs started popping all through the audience. I had played Caroline’s countless times before, and never once had anyone felt compelled to take my picture. That night, you would have thought I was J-Lo on the red carpet. I teased the crowd by hooking my thumbs into my underwear. They screamed, knowing full well that this observational monologist was most likely not sporting a backup thong.

Alas, I spared the club owners a glimpse of my peenie-whacker and instead approached the mic and opened my mouth to speak. Before I said a word, they burst out laughing again. I attempted two jokes. Each time the crowd shook with laughter, not because what I said was funny but because they couldn’t believe I was doing my act nearly naked.

I checked my watch. Having spent so much time undressing, my five minutes was about to expire. I gathered my tidy pile of clothing, thanked the audience for checking me out, and exited the stage to thunderous applause.

Now I felt bad for the poor bastard who had to follow me.

Angel Salazar° had witnessed the whole thing. Though he must have known I was mocking him, he was a good sport. He smiled and said, “Very funny.” What else could he say? He knew what he had done.

A number of the comics assembled along the back wall patted me on the back admiring my balls – literally.

One comic I knew out of Boston, Jay Charboneau, said, “That’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen.” This made me feel good, because I and everyone else knew I had sacrificed my audition. I hadn’t done any of my actual act. In fact, as funny as my improv was, and as much as I made those club owners laugh, none of them ever called me for a booking.

I didn’t care. I got my laughs. That’s the job.

Another comic asked, “What made you think to do that?”

I couldn’t explain. I felt I had no choice. It was the only viable thought that popped into my head. All I know is that it was not something that would have occurred to me earlier in my career. It was a product of experience. It could have only come to me after having had to deal with all manner of untenable situations over the years.

I read the room. My comedic instincts whispered, “Go for it.”

And the people laughed.

I’d like to see some AI, Artoo-Detoo, Waymo-programmed comedian sheck that out.

Angel Salazar: 1956 - 2024 R.I.P.

* The South Street Seaport was Caroline’s second location. The first venue was a restaurant in Chelsea on 8^th Avenue and 26^th Street. The third and final iteration of Caroline’s was located in Times Square, Broadway between 49^th and 50^th Streets. She had to close the Times Square location at the end of 2022 when the Kuwaiti wealth fund that owned the property raised the rent.

# Afterward, I found out that his manager was the lead organizer of the conference and had arranged for his client to slide into that prime spot --- my spot.

° I didn’t realize it at the time, but Angel had had a fairly conspicuous role as Chi Chi in the 1983 Brian DePalma version of the movie Scarface, starring Al Pacino.