Ariel Elias says she still hasn’t fully processed the incident at Uncle Vinnie’s Comedy Club on Saturday night in Point Pleasant Beach, NJ, a moment that has since gone viral.
“I still haven’t cried, and I know I have to,” she said on Gianmarco Soresi’s podcast The Downside today.
“I think I’m irritated by the attention,” Elias continued. Deadline announced yesterday that in addition to outlets such as Rolling Stone and CNN, producers of Jimmy Kimmel Live! want to book the comedian.
The incident in question involved an apparently drunk woman in the audience who asked Elias who she voted for in the last election, before insisting, “I can tell by your jokes that you voted for Biden.”
This resulted in Elias taking off (the verbal) gloves.
“I can tell by the fact that you keep talking when nobody wants you voting for Trump,” the comedian replied to great cheers from the audience.
Just a few seconds later, a beer can sailed across the room and slammed against the wall behind Elias, his jaw dropping. But without missing a beat, she came up with the prefect reply.
“As soon as I picked up the beer and felt it was still liquid,” Elias told Newsweek Monday, “I knew I had to drink it. It felt like the only way to recover. Also, I suddenly needed a drink badly, so it really worked.”
But in a way, Elias still hasn’t recovered and said, “I haven’t slept in a few days.”
She continued, “Saturday night when I got home, I looked at the video and I was like, ‘Oh… that was a really, really hard throw.’ I don’t think I had processed how hard that was thrown and what would have happened if it had hit me: It misses me, [and] It’s great for my career [and] it’s like a fun viral clip; it hits me [and] it is proof.”
Soresi, who headlined that night, said the woman in question was there with about 20 friends and that they “were at the club about two hours early, drinking” and that they were “brawlers.”
After the beer was thrown and he took the stage, Soresi said he was nervous when at one point he saw a flash of light somewhere in the club – likely someone vaping – and thought it might be a gunshot.
Elias said she had similar thoughts.
“My opening joke that Saturday night was, ‘I’m so glad to be here in South Jersey, where it’s easier to get a gun than it is to turn left,'” the comedian recalled, before musing, “It’s not outside of the kingdom [of possibility] to think someone had a gun there.”