If and when Alex Edelman gets his own TV series, the pilot is effectively already written. Edelman’s recent Broadway stand-up show, Just for Us, is framed around his semi-covert infiltration of a meeting of white nationalists in Queens, New York. Surrounded by 16 antisemites, the very Jewish writer-comedian (born David Yosef Shimon Ben Elazar Reuven Alexander Halevi Edelman) ingratiates himself by schooling the group about Twitter best practices so that they can become better communicators. Hilarity, flirting, free muffins, and a dramatic sense of impending danger abound.
I first discovered Edelman while doom-scrolling at the height of the pandemic, when the algorithm introduced me to clips of the Boston-bred comic’s gut-busting but infuriating rant about boomers buying their first homes for “11 raspberries” and his Thanksgiving “coming out” story. If Edelman were actually queer—he cheekily quips in Just for Us that he’s “straight with some secrets”—it wouldn’t be hard to imagine him coming out to his family with the same irreverence and gravitas that he describes in his act. It’s that impulse to be the court jester, to use humor as self-preservation, that’s earned him a following in the LGBTQ community.
Dressed in a gray button-up and tennis shoes, Edelman endearingly ambles around the stage contorting his body like a toddler who’s just learned how to walk. He compulsively runs his hand through his hair and widens his eyes to express bafflement, as if caffeine has been mainlined into his veins. Edelman claims in Just for Us that cocaine has no effect on him because he’s part of the “generation of overmedicated ADHD children.” He jokes at one point that, as a child, he was tested for autism so many times that the last one was on the house.
At its core, Just for Us is very much about Jewish identity, playing on all of the quirks and neuroses that were mainstreamed in the past by Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, and others. But as a millennial willing to fully embrace his faith, Edelman is able to locate the aspects of his identity that overlap with those with whom he ostensibly has little in common. (After all, living rooms that are forbidden except for “guests and tragedies” are not solely the province of Bostonian Jews.)
That skill—and it’s a learned one—for empathy extends even to finding a small shred of humanity in roomful of neo-Nazis. These people, Edelman suggests, were lost souls simply looking for a scapegoat. He self-deprecatingly accuses himself of being “pandering and solicitous,” and fears that his sincerity comes off as inauthentic. In this moment, you might be apt to agree.
But Edelman is a gifted storyteller who disarmingly balances satire, straight comedy, and old-fashioned pathos. When he’s finally outed as Jewish at the meeting, “Chelsea”—the friendly young woman he half-ironically fantasized about getting married to in his parents’ synagogue—approaches him from across the room, arms tightly crossed, and furiously tells him, “You can’t be here. This is just for us. Go!” The lingering laughter in the audience is replaced by a thick, uncomfortable silence. It’s a reality check—for him and us.
Truly great comedy does that. It’s funny, yes, but it’s also sharp, fearless, and an often unpleasant reflection of the world we live in. At the end of the meeting, Edelman attempts to convince the others that white privilege does, in fact, exist. “I got a free muffin for it an hour ago!” he proclaims. It’s a killer punchline, but it’s also a poetic representation of Edelman’s deeply held conviction that fixing the problem starts by looking within.
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