The first time I met Alex Edelman, maybe six or seven years ago, he breathlessly told me how he had just returned from his first and likely last karate lesson. The stand-up comic had come to Charlotte to open for a comedian friend, and even though he could not remember being interested in karate or any other sort of violence for even a single moment of his life, he felt reflexively compelled to wander into a strip-mall dojo and do some training. It didn’t have to be a karate studio. It could have been a sushi-making class or a dog-grooming academy or a bait-shop workshop on making largemouth-bass fishing lures. He would have walked through the door no matter what.
Doors appeal to Alex. They always have.
“Wait, are you going to tell everybody about the karate guy?” he asks.
Oh yeah. A few weeks after Alex went into that karate studio, his instructor, Randall Ephraim, stepped in to stop a kidnapping happening outside the studio. Alex immediately called to talk with Ephraim, and they have kept in touch.
That speaks pretty directly to the rhythms of Alex’s life. He is eager—sometimes even desperate—to do anything and everything as fast as he can.
“I feel sometimes a little guilty about being alive, as silly as that is,” he says. “It’s a thing I haven’t been able to change, even as friends are always trying to push this out of me a little bit. I think it can be quite draining to be around someone who’s always worried about justifying his own existence on the planet.
“But—and I’m not specifically talking about going into that karate studio, but I’m also not not talking about that—I believe there’s a unique and weird interconnectedness of things that we all have access to all the time. So why not try to access it?”
He adds: “Why not be as big and thoughtful and strange as possible?”
Indeed, why not? This is the road Alex Edelman, who is now thirty-five, has followed ever since his youngest days in Boston. He worked for the Boston Red Sox when he was a teenager. He studied English at NYU and then went to the UK to perform stand-up comedy. For a time, he did a comedy radio show for BBC 4 called “Alex Edelman’s Peer Group.” He wrote for a couple television shows. During Covid, he was the head writer for a virtual Passover seder that raised more than $3 million for charity.
It wasn’t a calculated path, but it provided what Edelman needed to succeed nonetheless.
“I never thought about any of it in terms of success,” he says. “I’ve always just wanted to make really good stuff and learn how to make really good stuff.… You know [the writer] Jenji Kohan says that Hollywood is like a pie-eating contest where the prize is more pie. Well, all I’ve ever wanted was pie.”
His 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. It became the must-see show and has opened countless doors for Edelman as a writer and performer. In July, he was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special.
“I have been so lucky to find places where people let me make stuff even though I don’t necessarily fit in,” he says. “Broadway is a really good example. I’m, like, a stand-up comedian who, with a bunch of good people, created something that’s sort of a mix of a TV writers room, a solo show, and international show, all in a New York City comedy club. I don’t know that that mixture really fits anywhere. But people sort of made room for it.
“So, no, I obviously didn’t have a blueprint for any of this. How could I? I’m not famous from television. I’m not famous from the movies. I’m not famous from the Internet. I have just wanted to make interesting things. I don’t know what being a ‘maverick’ means. I just know that I have wanted to make interesting things, and people have let me do that.”
When I ask Alex what’s next, he rattles off some projects he’s working on—he’s writing for a TV show, he’s developing something, he’s getting opportunities—but then he stops to say that he isn’t really sure what’s next because he isn’t really sure how he got here in the first place. So who knows what’s around the corner? But one thing is for sure: He plans to stay busy.
“I am now more resigned to the fact that I won’t be able to go everywhere and meet everyone,” he says. “But that’s not an easy thing for me to accept. I’m sort of led by experience. And I don’t know what those experiences will be or what I will get out of them. If I knew what they would be, I mean, what would even be the point?
“So I guess if I could put it into words, I’d like to spend my time having fun and being really different and makings stuff that entertains people and maybe makes some of them feel less alone. I think those are all good things. And as someone who loves sports and statistics, I’ll admit that I think I’d really love to have some stranger in Wisconsin open up my obituary and read it and go, ‘Wow, that guy really packed a lot in.’”
Edelman clothing credits: Coat and turtleneck by Moschino; shirt by Rhude; trousers by Emporio Armani; loafers by Manolo Blahnik.
Photographed by Mark Seliger
Styled by Chloe Hartstein
Hair by Kevin Ryan using GO247 & UNITE
Grooming by Melissa DeZarate using Oribe
Makeup by Rebecca Restrepo using Lisa Eldridge Beauty
Production by Madi Overstreet and Ruth Levy
Set Design by Michael Sturgeon
Nails by Eri Handa using Dior
Tailoring by Yana Galbshtein
Design Director Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visual Director James Morris
Executive Director, Entertainment Randi Peck
