Alex Edelman on grieving his best friend, letting go of 'Just For Us' with new HBO special

NEW YORK − Alex Edelman is feeling a lot right now. Most surprising of all, relief.

Last weekend, the comedian played the final performance of his hit stand-up show “Just For Us,” which recounts his startling experience as a Jewish man crashing a white nationalists meeting. Over the past six years, Edelman, 35, has performed the incisive set more than 500 times around the world. An HBO special, filmed during the show’s Broadway run last summer, premieres Saturday (10 EDT/PDT), and is streaming on Max.

“I always thought it was going to get stale,” Edelman says, wandering through the Museum of Natural History on a rainy afternoon recently. “But when I got through it without ever mailing it in, I was like, ‘OK, well you’ve gotta know when to fold ‘em.’ I’ve been listening to that song a lot, actually, ‘The Gambler.’ It’s a great Kenny Rogers song,” he adds, crooning the chorus as we stroll past dioramas of rhinos and antelope. “I guess I got to walk away.”

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'Comedy should not be journalism'

The seeds of “Just For Us” were planted in 2017, when Edelman received “an avalanche of antisemitism” from online trolls. He stumbled on an invite for a get-together of white supremacists at an apartment in Queens, and feeling emboldened, decided to infiltrate the mixer. His mission was to uncover the root of their hatred and bigotry. But through comedy, Edelman uses the experience to spark bigger conversations about identity, whiteness and the limits of empathy.

“Just For Us” is Edelman’s third solo show after 2014’s “Millennial” and 2015’s “Everything Handed to You.” The set has earned him widespread critical acclaim and A-list fans, including his comedy heroes Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Crystal and Steve Martin. Despite the sold-out runs and late-night TV appearances, Edelman has not heard from the “Nerf Nazis” he met at the meeting.

“I feel very powerfully that comedy should not be journalism,” Edelman says. And yet, if he ran into any of them now, “my curiosity would be about how they feel about the liberties I’ve taken. I’d want to ask, ‘What part of your worldview do you think is important to communicate? Because I’m communicating what I think is important.’”

Edelman is fascinated by the stories we tell about ourselves: what we do and don’t remember, and the details we flourish or omit. Adam Brace, Edelman’s best friend and the show’s director, died of a stroke last spring at 43, weeks before “Just For Us” opened on Broadway. Brace was one of the first people Edelman told about the meeting, and he wrote it down for posterity as they conceived the show together. But those notes were lost with his death.

“One of the things that bugs me about Adam is that there’s a little notebook somewhere with the story that is closest to the reality of it,” Edelman says. “Sometimes I mourn the loss of the real story, as it’s replaced by the version of a thing I’ve told 500 times; this real-life experience that was adjusted and comedian-ized. But that version’s nice, too. I like that version.”

'People were worried that antisemitism is too niche'

Edelman was born in Boston; his mother was a lawyer and his father a physician. He started doing stand-up as a teen, which was "really rocky" save for “one good joke” about “The Godfather” that always got laughs. (“I was describing the scene where Sonny Corleone gets gunned down at the toll booth and I go, ‘If that’s not the best commercial for E-ZPass I’ve ever seen!’”)

His Orthodox Jewish upbringing is a source of much of his comedy. He brought a friend’s bar mitzvah to a “screeching halt” performing Don McLean’s “American Pie.” (His own bar mitzvah theme was, simply, Judaism.) Staring out the window of a palatial museum library, he’s eager to talk about guilt, a common theme in Judaism. (“I feel like there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and everything needs to be really hard.”) And like many of us, his religious practice is constantly evolving. (“I think I believe in God, but we also need a conversation before we’re going to be back on good terms.”)

In recent months, he has increasingly been asked in interviews to weigh in on rising antisemitism and the Israel-Hamas conflict. Edelman is willing to engage in those discussions, but also is quick to remind people: This show is meant to be funny, above all else.

“Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, you’re an expert on antisemitism,’ but I never claim any sort of expertise,'" Edelman says. That said, “I like that people are talking about this now. People were worried that antisemitism is too niche a concern, but now it's kind of mainstream.”

'The show was like a conversation piece with him'

Early in our visit, Edelman makes a beeline for a case of Korean pots and bowls. “I’m mad into pottery,” he says, recalling how he traveled to a small town in Japan late last year to make ceramics. “I have a bad habit of accumulating hobbies. Comedy is one of those, I guess.”

He’s also a “big Broadway nut” and was particularly moved this season by Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along,” which charts the end of a creative partnership. For the past year, “Just For Us” has been his tether to Brace, and the show's ending has brought up complex feelings of grief. The longtime collaborators met when Edelman was 21, and everything he wrote was to impress Brace.

"He was the smartest, funniest friend," Edelman says. "After he died, the show was like a conversation piece with him. It made me feel very close to him. When I say Broadway was hard, that was a big part of it. Every day, I would have one moment when I would feel completely torn apart. There was a bit of magical thinking with me doing the show, being like, ‘Oh, he’ll come back for closing.’” Touring the U.S. became similarly taxing: “Toward the end of it, I was just like: ‘Hey man, I’m talking to you every night. Please come back.’”

Edelman credits Brace’s family for supporting him, along with theater folks including Alex Timbers, who directed the HBO taping. The special is dedicated to Brace: “I just miss him,” Edelman says. “I feel really close to Timbers now. But still, ending the show, I'm kind of relieved to move on. Like I said, that was my biggest surprise emotion.”

He has little interest in adapting “Just For Us” into a TV series or memoir, although he is writing a movie based on an unexpected family Christmas he recalls in the special. He’s already back to doing stand-up sets and testing out new material, but he’s not sure what the next solo show will be.

“The idea of coming down a mountain and trying to climb another one – I need to climb around in the boulders and see if there’s something,” Edelman says. “I need to get my feet back a little bit; I need a long nap. I just need to let go of this one completely.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Alex Edelman talks HBO special, ‘Just For Us’ and white nationalists