Alex Edelman: Just Like Us

  The leap from the standard standup comedy special to Alex Edelman's Just for Us is like Shakespeare's advance upon the morality play. Colour it quantum.

The Broadway show comes to us on Netflix. Instead of running gags Edelman unfurls a multithreaded narrative. We know it's going to be personal from the first scene. Instead of opening on the Broadway stage it shows him in his dressing room, then follows his run down to the stage — where the performance conventionally begins. The entire drama will focus on this theme— the continuity between the performer's life and his performance. 

Or: how our life indeed is performance, routines that attempt to connect us to others. Conversely, the willful drives that separate us by our instincts and impede our stabs at understanding, at union.

Arguably the drama's core is the story of Koko, the gorilla taught to use sign language. Long after having met comedian Robin Williams, upon hearing of his death Koko signed an expression of grief. Edelman tells the story at the beginning of his… no, ‘routine,' won’t do… drama. He returns to it at  the end.

The Koko drama is the miracle of inter-species communication, especially through the Williams forte, comedy. Between the versions of that miracle Edelman dramatizes the failures in communication and connection within that apparently inferior species, the benighted human.

Obviously the main example of that gap is the neo-Nazi and the Jew. As Edelman develops the tension of the cell meeting that he crashed, he suggests a couple of possible reconciliations. One is his reflex fantasy of a relationship, even perhaps marriage, with the attractive woman, named — in her own cross-cultural ambition, Chelsea…. “You never know” ….But she ultimately orders him out. 

Also, as he finds himself sympathizing with his persecutors he finds himself even identifying with them — down to a fleeting fantasy of becoming their Klan leader.

But alas no such triumph over malice is humanly realistic. The best our hero can do to thwart this historic enemy is — to steal a piece from the hostess’s monster crossword puzzle.

  But he manages a larger triumph. From all his insecurities, all his vulnerabilities, he salvages —this performance! He wins his theatre audience with his shameless self-exposure. So he confides in us his autism. He recalls overhearing his mother’s remark to the doctor: “What do you mean, ‘He’s fine!’?” So too he tells us his jokes—that didn’t work! He has supplementary tensions with his brother the Olympian, with his father the Orthodox, essentially with life.

Finally, for all the centrality of his Jewishness the climactic counterpoint crops up in his comic memory of his family transcending their faith and identity. Tanks to the generosity of his mother towards a bereft Christian friend, in once celebrating Christmas they discover —through that conflct — the true meaning of that pagan festivity. It is mentschlichkeit. The concept as Jewish as Jesus. The Other is the hidden You.

One must also note perhaps the most dramatic element in Edelman's performance — his animal, possibly manic, energy. From his bounce down those stairs he does not stop moving. He runs, he jumps, he freezes in total-body pathos. 

There is no calm in his story, no peace. Just the commitment of the driven. The compulsive spirit of Robin Williams rides us again. And if he went for the comedy, we’re left with Koko’s pain.This performance lays bare the function of comic performance. Beyond amusement, its ambition is to establish harmony with the Other. That is work. Today that is vital.