I can still remember feeling ripped off and cheated the first time I saw Adam Sandler demonstrate his low-budget ideas for Halloween costumes like "Crazy Spoonhead." That was a concept I had been humorously perfecting for years, dazzling audiences of peers and friends. "Look at me, I'm Woodchuck Cider Head," I would say, pressing a bottle of Woodchuck Cider up against my noggin. "I've got a Woodchuck Cider on my head!"

 

      This is how longtime Long Island comedian and actor Steve Strangio has to react every time he watches Office Space. After years on the stand-up circuit, the Oceanside native and resident—who's perennially eager to talk and make jokes, softening the initial intimidation of his tall, burly presence—has been a writer and performer on a number of movie, TV, theater and video projects. Most recently, he's written Happy Saturdays, a play that acts out like a wacky sitcom about adventures in theme-restaurant employment, fittingly performed in front of audiences as they dine. While a certain Mike Judge film seemingly sapped that well dry in 1999, Strangio has been brainstorming a comedic exposé into the life of a waiter (he despises the industry-enforced term "server") at establishments like Friday's, Bennigans and Chili's for close to a decade. The one thing he won't divulge, though, is which of the chains he slaved away at for several years.

 

      Outside of that, he's open to discuss anything, from his love life and its influence on his comedy to the genius of his favorite B-grade horror films, such as Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. As we become comfortable on the conference-room couch of his management company's office, he's eager to share anecdotes and witticisms, speaking in a booming and articulate voice that has clearly been trained for the stage. He's even quicker to mock my movements as I trip spastically over what appeared to be a small child on my way to the water cooler, but was in fact a life-sized doll.

Strangio hands me a brochure for Happy Saturdays. The document is a color-photocopied, mock restaurant menu advertising "Barstool Olympics," "Nude Trivia Hour" and other faux happy-hour events, in addition to information about the play and Strangio. It describes the experience of his dinner-theater presentation as "a place where people can be rude, crude, lewd and anything else that rhymes with those words."

 

      Strangio's journey began in the early 1980s, a fruitful time for Long Island comedy, highlighted by well-known stand-ups like Bob Nelson and Jim Myers. "I've always been a comedian in a way, and always liked to have a good time," says Strangio. But it wasn't until enrolling at Nassau Community College and attending a comedy event at the Student Union that he was encouraged to first get up in front of hundreds of people and try to make them laugh. "They said to me, 'Steve, you're a funny guy, can you do some comedy for us?'" he recalls, switching his intonation and vocal pitch whenever adopting someone else's persona. "I went away for a couple of days, I got all of my friends together, and we just rehearsed and rehearsed, and I wrote like 20 minutes [of material]. First time on stage in front of 300 people, and I killed. It was such an amazing, amazing experience." It was also an experience that immediately came crashing down on his next attempt, which took place at the now-defunct East Side Comedy Club in Huntington. "I went there and bombed," he laughs. "To the point where my friends were heckling me. So, I went outside and beat up my car, and I went back the next week, and I bombed again. And I bombed consistently for three months, until one day, I just started killing."

 

      His philosophy on comedy and success is as simple as your mother's recipe for doing well in school and achieving your dreams. "If you fail, don't give up. Because you don't fail, you learn," he shrugs. "I knew this was what I wanted to do. I knew this was where I wanted to be at the time."

 

      And while he's confident that a new local comedy boom is on the horizon, Strangio can't help but be nostalgic for the environment he came of age in. "The cool thing about comedy back then was a lot of comedians were really supportive of you and always there for you," he explains. "And even if you bombed, they would say, 'Steve, come here. Here's what you did wrong. Don't do that next time.' And little by little, they helped get me to where I wanted to be, and in turn, I help do that to a lot of other comics." When asked what some of his advice might be to younger amateurs, he talks about the arrogance of the occasional newcomer. "The stage is the great truth," he says. "If you get up there and you're bombing, don't say you didn't bomb. Face reality. You bombed. Learn from it."

 

      Eventually, the stand-up stage wasn't enough to keep Strangio happy. He made the jump to acting, playwriting and screenwriting in the mid-'90s, at 31 years old. It was around this same time that employment at theme restaurants came calling.

Relationships between lovers and friends are a recurring theme in all of Strangio's work, starting with his first play, This is Love, and equally so in Happy Saturdays. "It's a universal thing that everybody goes through in everyday life, and it effects and drives everybody," says Strangio of romantic entanglements. "And when you're [working at a theme restaurant], you're trapped in this big group of a lot of attractive people, a lot of whom have great personalities, and since you have no other life beside that, you start dating them."

 

      Of course, the play also deals with the humorous intricacies that only a "server" would be privy to, like being told to "turn 'em and burn 'em" when a large Saturday night crowd comes in. He also delves into detail about the nightmare that is "singing the Happy Birthday song." "I have to stop what I'm doing, I have to get the cake ready and everything, I have to stand to the entrance of the kitchen, and as people are walking by, go, 'Can you sing? Can you sing?' And they don't want to sing, because they're gonna lose their tables. So by the time you get everybody, they're angry, and now we have to walk over to you..." he says, breaking out into a jokingly frustrated rendition of the famous tune.

 

      No longer stuck in the mire of the food-service industry, Strangio is still trying his hand at making a name for himself creat-ively. With a screenplay for a feature-length film called Journey to the Strip Mall being shopped around and Happy Saturdays being received well by audiences across LI, he seems both well on his way and alarmingly patient for a guy who's been going at this for two decades. "It's called the ladder of success for a reason," he explains with what seems to be his trademark calm rationale. "One rung at a time."