It was Saturday night, and the crowds were beginning to arrive at Uncle Vinnie’s Comedy Club in Point Pleasant Beach, a seaside town in New Jersey.
Comedians Ariel Elias and Gianmarco Soresi were standing at the back of the club, watching patrons enter, when they noticed a group of about 20 people take their seats. The group appeared to be celebrating a birthday, with some wearing stereotypical Mexican-themed costumes, and they looked to be a few drinks in when they arrived at the BYOB club.
Soresi said he turned to Elias and jokingly predicted the group would probably get thrown out for being too rowdy. “I was like, ‘I hope they get thrown out during your set instead of mine,’” Soresi recalled. “Sure enough, it was worse than either of us could have possibly imagined.”
As Elias performed her opening set around 9:30 p.m., she delivered her usual material about body image and being a woman. The audience seemed to be having a good time, but she decided to open it up for a Q&A — something Elias does to elicit laughs and work the crowd.
That’s when a woman in the rowdy group raised her hand and asked something Elias wasn’t ready for: “Did you vote for Donald Trump?”
“Um, fuck,” Elias recalled to BuzzFeed News of what she thought in that moment. “I think it was mostly just like, Why are you asking me this? What's your endgame here?”
As video of the encounter shows, the crowd seems uncomfortable with the politics question, and Elias does her best to bat it away with a joke: “Why would you ask me that knowing I’m the only Jew in this room? Are you trying to get me killed?!”