Queens, New York: home of the New York Mets, La Guardia Airport, and apparently, open-invitation white-nationalist meetings. A spur-of-the-moment decision to attend one of these latter soirées forms the basis for comedian Alex Edelman’s Just for Us, which, after an extended run on Broadway, is now making the jump to HBO. Per the trailer for the upcoming special, Edelman, who is Jewish, quickly began to second-guess his choice. “At some point, this guy two seats away from me went, ‘Jews are sneaky and they’re everywhere!’” he recalls, his eyes widening in terror.
Shot at the Hudson Theatre in New York and directed by Alex Timbers, Just for Us shares a percentage of its DNA with the one-person comedy shows popularized by Mike Birbiglia in specials like The New One and The Old Man and the Pool; fittingly, Birbiglia serves as executive producer. Writing about the Broadway version of the show in June 2023, Vulture critic Jackson McHenry called it “a crowd-pleasing, often hilarious show, with a time bomb labeled ‘Is it good that I am here making you laugh?’ at its center.”
Validate Edelman’s risky choice to infiltrate this group of Nazis by watching Just for Us when it hits HBO April 6.
