Edelman's drive to be as big and thoughtful and strange as possible led him to what has become his career-shifting success, the show Just for Us. It builds around Edelman's Orthodox Jewish upbringing—his full name, as he rattles off during the show is "Dovid Yosef Shimon ben Elazer Reuven Alexander Halevi Edelman"—and his very Alex-like decision to covertly crash a meeting of white nationalists in Queens. He performed the show over and over again in the UK and in small New York theaters, fine-tuning it with his late friend Adam Brace. Slowly and painstakingly, they turned it from a machine-gun-like barrage of punchlines into a nuanced but still joke-filled exploration of faith and empathy and those things that bind us. "That show took fucking years," he says. And in the end, Just for Us became an unlikely and massive hit on Broadway, won Edelman a special Tony Award, and was filmed for HBO. |
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