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Martin Lawrence | The Wait Out Man

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Before Martin, before “Bad Boys,” before he was doing his own stunts against Will Smith’s better judgment, there was a guy on stage at BAM turning relationship psychology into a full-body bit.

“The Wait Out Man” is a routine Martin Lawrence performs in his 1994 concert film Martin Lawrence: You So Crazy, shot at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and directed by Thomas Schlamme. The bit lays out a specific character type: the guy who doesn’t chase, doesn’t pressure, doesn’t even try — he just sticks around, makes himself useful as a shoulder to cry on, and waits for the boyfriend to mess up so he can slide into the vacancy. It’s Lawrence at his most observational, less about a punchline than about naming a behavior everybody in the room recognized.

• You So Crazy was filmed live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and directed by Thomas Schlamme.
• The routine contrasts two archetypes: the loud, obvious pursuer and the patient “wait out” friend who plays the long con by being present.
• The special arrived while Lawrence was simultaneously hosting HBO’s Def Comedy Jam and starring in his Fox sitcom Martin, making 1994 arguably the peak overlap of his stand-up and TV careers.

The Setup Behind the Bit

Lawrence builds “The Wait Out Man” the way he builds most of his best material — by acting it out physically rather than just describing it. He shifts his posture, drops his voice, and walks the stage as the character, letting the audience watch the guy’s patience turn into strategy in real time. The joke isn’t that the Wait Out Man is scheming; it’s that everyone watching has either been him, dated him, or had a friend who was him.

That’s the mechanic that made the routine stick decades before clip culture existed to keep it alive. It doesn’t rely on a topical reference or a news event that expires — it’s built on a dynamic between men and women that doesn’t change, which is exactly why the bit still circulates as an official clip online.

BAM Selected for Project Site

Filming a comedy special at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was itself a statement. BAM wasn’t a comedy club circuit stop; it was a serious performing-arts venue, and putting Lawrence there signaled he’d graduated from clubs to a bigger stage — literally and career-wise. The crowd reaction captured in You So Crazy shows a room that’s leaning into every beat of the delivery, not just laughing at a premise but reacting to Lawrence’s timing and physical commitment to the character.

He offers a shoulder to cry on while secretly biding his time — the whole con is patience.

Stand-Up as the Other Half of His Career

By 1994, Lawrence was running two lanes at once. On television, he was the host who made Def Comedy Jam a launching pad for a generation of Black comics, and he was leading his own network sitcom. On stage, specials like You So Crazy were where he kept his raw, unfiltered material — the stuff that wouldn’t fit on network TV. “The Wait Out Man” belongs firmly in that second lane: it’s sharper, more physical, and more willing to sit in an uncomfortable observation than anything he was doing on Martin at the time.

That split is worth remembering when watching a routine like this one. Comics of that era — the same wave that produced sets like Eddie Griffin’s material on race — used their stand-up specials as the place to say what the sitcom format wouldn’t allow, and Lawrence’s BAM special is a clean example of that pattern.

A Character That Outlasted the Special

“The Wait Out Man” is frequently cited alongside Lawrence’s other signature character bits from the ’90s as proof of why his stand-up still gets pulled apart and shared decades later — the same reason clips of interview-gone-wrong energy or old sketch staples like Key & Peele’s interrogation sketch keep resurfacing. It’s not nostalgia alone; it’s that the observation still tracks, and Lawrence’s delivery hasn’t lost anything watching it back.

The routine has become one of the most quoted pieces from You So Crazy, right up there with the special’s other relationship bits, and it’s part of why the film still gets referenced whenever people rank the best stand-up specials of the 1990s.