Staying on topic might be asking too much of a human hummingbird like Alex Edelman. In Just for Us, his one-man show at three jokes a minute, he darts from punchline to punchline almost as fast as he dances around the Hudson Theater stage. (At 34, he’s part of what he calls the over-medicated ADHD generation.) If you haven’t read that his performance hit Broadway, you might have guessed it from his introduction — in which he describes his usual style as ‘benign silliness’ describes and says This ‘isn’t Ibsen’ – that you are in for a merry evening of laughter.
And even though he tells a story about white supremacy, do it.
That’s the glory, and also the little catch, of Just for Us, which premiered Monday after performances in London, Edinburgh, Washington and Off Broadway. No, it’s not Ibsen, a playwright rarely known for his sizzling one-liners. But it’s not silly either. Despite its rabbi-on-Ritalin aesthetic and desperation to be liked at all costs, the show is thoughtful and high-minded enough to come with a mission statement. Edelman wants to start a conversation about Jews’ place on the “whiteness spectrum,” he recently told my colleague Jason Zinoman, “without engaging in a conversation about victimhood.”
He is good at making the distinction. Growing up a “proudly and staunchly” Orthodox Jew in “that really racist part of Boston called Boston,” he sensed the distrust between races, but also within them. And while he admits to having experienced “fairly white privilege,” he was so alienated from mainstream culture that he didn’t know what Christmas was until one year when his mother celebrated it when a non-Jewish friend was mourning.
Oy what a tsouris it caused in his yeshiva!
As hilarious as the story that follows is, one gets the feeling that “Just for Us” would have been little more than a millennial update of Jackie Mason-style Jewish humor were it not for those millennial accelerators on social media. “An avalanche of anti-Semitism” on Twitter, in response to some comments he posted, fueled Edelman’s thoughts on identity-based hatred, prompting him to infiltrate a white supremacist gathering in Queens one night in 2017.
“A Jew enters a bar,” the joke might begin, although it wasn’t a bar, as Edelman had expected, but a private residence. There he was seated among 16 strangers with predictably pan-bigoted opinions. By marrying Prince Harry, Meghan Markle would “humiliate” one of Europe’s oldest families. Diversity initiatives represent “a plan for slow genocide of white people.” Jews, the root of the weeds of this genocide, “are sneaky and everywhere.”
That we seldom feel the shock or even the discomfort of Edelman’s encounter is partly intentional; He portions his spinach with plenty of candied yams. He debunks the comment “sneaky and everywhere” and admits he wasn’t able to sit incognito and refute that point. Then he abruptly descends into a seemingly incoherent ten-minute story about vaccine deniers. Likewise, the racial slur of Meghan Markle is immediately cut short when Harry snorts cocaine through a rolled-up ‘picture of his grandmother’.
The indirection is not useless; Edelman builds the access roads to his main argument. But that argument is far less common than the jokes, taking up only about 35 minutes of the 85-minute show — a proportion that betrays its origins in the stand-up space. David Korins’ set also betrays those origins, consisting of little more than a miniature proscenium to rescale expectations and a black ottoman direct from your local comedy Korner.
The real clue, however, is compulsive pandering. While it elicits plenty of laughter, including too much giggling from the comedian himself, the canine overzealousness could have used a tone down, and likely would have if Edelman’s longtime director, Adam Brace, had been able to wrap up his work on the production . (He died of complications from a stroke in March, aged 43.) Alex Timbers, who is credited as a creative advisor, was instrumental in bringing the show to Broadway.
And yet the pandering, distracting as it is, is also strategic. The show wouldn’t work without the contrast between storytelling and jokes. By acting “stupid and petty” on such a serious issue – Edelman describes the arrangement of the chairs at the meeting as an “anti-semicircle” – he is laying the groundwork for a solution in which he directs the criticism at himself while he addresses the larger issues available.
Because, as he promised, “Just for Us” isn’t about the victimhood of Jews, or anyone except maybe the offended racists who are too small and whiny to pose a real threat. He calls them Nerf Nazis. Also, Just for Us (as the racists end up describing their territory) isn’t really about the spectrum of whiteness. What is at stake instead is the idea of empathy, a core value in Edelman’s vision of Judaism. How far does it go? Is it unconditional? Do even the hateful deserve it? And what is particularly relevant for Edelman in this case: Is it because of bad motives?
Because look at this, there is a cute woman at the meeting who seems to be into him. Could he be the guy to “fix” them? Who fixes the whole group? They, too, allowed themselves to be insinuated: “I came as an observer,” he says. “Maybe I’ll go as a youth officer.”
That’s moral vanity, Edelman admits: a professional charmer’s eagerness to flatter other people’s self-esteem in order to bolster his own. That makes Just for Us more than a catskills club act washed up on Broadway like Mason’s. Despite all the stupid jokes (yes, I’ve laughed at everyone) it ends up being a critique of both stupidity and jokes.
If this is a very indirect route to insight, it is also a most effective route, leading us through the process by which a Jew or anyone can learn once again that the price of being liked at all costs is to is high.
Just for us
At the Hudson Theater, Manhattan, through August 19; justforusshow.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.