Best Of: Alex Edelman on ‘Just For Us’ and comedy as “a high-wire, high-risk act”

Capehart

The Washington Post

News, News Commentary, Politics

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Alex Edelman has just won a Tony award for his Broadway solo stand-up show "Just for Us" that he also turned into a HBO special. In this encore presentation from April, Edelman talks about exploring antisemitism through humor in the hit show and why the special “felt conversant with the moment but also sort of an escape from” Hamas’s October 7 attack. Conversation recorded on April 3, 2024.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Jonathan Kapart and welcome to Kapart. A Jewish man walks into a white nationalist meeting in New York City.
0:07.5	What could possibly go wrong?
0:10.0	For stand-up comedian Alex Edelman, this actually happened in 2018, and he turned that unforgettable
0:16.6	experience into a hit Broadway show called Just for Us, which was then turned into
0:22.0	an HBO special that debuted on April 6th.
0:26.0	Then on June 16th, just for us earned Alex Edelman a special Tony Award on Broadway's
0:32.4	biggest night.
0:34.2	So in honor of his big win, we present you an encore presentation of my conversation with
0:40.8	Alex Edelman first recorded for Washington Post live on April 2nd.
0:45.0	Alex talks all about the special, how it came to be,
0:49.0	how it became, quote, conversant with the Times in the aftermath of October 7th, and why the death of his best
0:56.7	friend and work partner Adam played a role in his decision to stop doing the just for us routine. I've already seen this special. It is, it's so
1:08.2	funny and the ending is, I'm not even going to give it away.
1:12.6	It is just.
1:13.6	Please don't.
1:14.6	No, no, I won't.
1:16.0	So just for us has been off Broadway, on Broadway,
1:19.2	part of a national tour, including a stop here in Washington.
1:22.4	But for those of us who are unfamiliar with your
1:25.3	show give a brief summary.
1:29.3	Okay, so I there's lots of jokes, but I went to this meeting of
1:35.0	I went to this meeting of White Nationalists in Queens and
	...

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