Plus: Liz Kingman’s One Woman Show, and the state of solo comedy meta-theater.
Photo: Matthew Murphy
Alex Edelman starts his solo show by bringing its scale all the way down. He rambles about his preference for silly jokes over anything politically incisive, launching into a riff about a gorilla’s friendship with Robin Williams — “Even gorillas were like, ‘This guy is unbelievable” — and contrasting Williams’s nearly universal audience with his own specific appeal, saying “my comedy barely works if you’re not a Jew from the Upper East Side.
On the stage of the Hudson Theatre, Edelman starts out with the classic wooden stool , and then brings on two more as he describes the meeting. There’s one for Chelsea, and then one for the racist who’s most skeptical to his presence, who goes by “Cortez.” The staging, like the material itself, is both approachable and stealthily unsetting. As Edelman zags from his main story into some of his many digressions, the stools stick around, acting as a thematic anchor.
Edelman has honed his descriptions of the events of this meeting , but his jokes get broader when he digresses. He’s not just introducing a few tangents but shifting into a looser mode of comedy, with more easily available references. At one point he has a line about explaining to his father why he doesn’t go by his full name, David Yosef Shimon ben Elazar Reuven Alexander Halevi Edelman, leads to ajoke that’s past its sell-by date.
The moment when Edelman gets around to saying what he’d hoped to accomplish by attending that meeting is whereaccelerates and the time bomb goes off. Edelman considers the possibility of landing on a sentiment like “we’re all humans deep down,” which would be false and unsatisfying, and instead goes from self-deprecating to self-critical, examining his own impulses with the same attention he gave the weird apartment full of racists and puzzles.
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