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    6 Comedy Specials Worth Watching Over Memorial Day Weekend

    New hours from Sarah Silverman, Mike Birbiglia, Jerrod Carmichael and others range widely in subject and style. But they all provide laugh-out-loud moments.Sarah Silverman, ‘PostMortem’(Stream it on Netflix)“Death is really hard for me,” Sarah Silverman says with the kind of impeccably performed earnestness that makes you believe her banal statement for just long enough to be sideswiped by the punchline. “And that’s what makes me unique.” What actually makes Silverman different is that few others would handle the death of a father and stepmother in the same month by joking merrily about merch. “I really feel like my parents would want me to monetize this,” she says.No amount of tragedy is going to turn Silverman into a maudlin solo artist. Her funniest jokes employ sarcasm, not sincerity. Despite its subject matter, this new hour is, in some ways, classic Silverman terrain, with raunchy bits and Hitler references. I wouldn’t even call it her most personal special. The closest she gets to philosophizing is a long chunk about the ignored life of the fly. Attention must be paid. She pays tribute to the memory of her parents through descriptions in loving detail.As those who saw her 2022 musical “The Bedwetter” know, her father clearly passed down a warmhearted, open-book sensibility. She ends with a scene from his last days, a beautiful (and gross) account of helping him pee. The most moving moment to me, though, was her consideration of the last words of her stepmother: “Your hair. It’s so dry.” Silverman looks grateful: “She always told me the truth.”Mike Birbiglia, ‘The Good Life’(Stream it on Netflix)Mike Birbiglia dislikes the friends of his 9-year-old daughter. Watching them, he quips, “makes me really not understand pedophilia.” That may not sound like a Birbiglia joke to you, but despite being a mostly clean, NPR- and Lincoln Center-approved comic, he has long been drawn to secrets, small transgressions and the humorous possibilities of being unlikable. He’s just not flamboyant about it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Comic With Many Questions About Jews and Whiteness

    Alex Edelman thrives on doubt in “Just for Us” on Broadway. It’s the result of years of revision and notes from Seinfeld, Birbiglia and the late Adam Brace.When Jerry Seinfeld talked to the comic Alex Edelman after seeing him perform “Just for Us,” his solo show that began previews on Broadway this week, he gave him one note: Don’t acknowledge the audience’s response to a joke onstage.Edelman, 34, took it, even though he has the kind of sensitive, hyperactive mind that can’t help but look past the fourth wall. In an interview recently at Russ & Daughters on the Lower East Side, he kept peeking at my list of questions, inquiring why I was writing down “L’s” (I wasn’t) and periodically asking me how he was doing (very well). He seemed to answer questions while simultaneously imagining how they were playing, even in emotional moments like discussing his longtime friend, collaborator and director Adam Brace, who tragically died in April at 43 after a stroke.Brace had been critical at every stage of Edelman’s show from its inception in 2018 through hundreds of performances, and after almost all of them the British director gave him notes. “He looked after the flow of the show,” Edelman said, which is why the comic paused in our conversation as he considered a joke he had worked on at the Comedy Cellar the night before, his eyes watering as he said how much he missed having Brace as a sounding board. He then imagined how getting choked up would come off, writing the sentence out loud (“and his eyes fill up”) before quipping: “Don’t overdo it.”During the pandemic, “Just for Us,” a thoughtful, punchline-dense comedy, skipped past downtown hit into the rarefied air of cultural phenomenon. I knew it made the zeitgeist when friends not especially interested in comedy approached me wanting to talk about it. The autobiographical show benefits from a killer elevator pitch: Orthodox Jewish comic gets accidentally invited to a white supremacist meeting in Queens, attends and has a meet-cute flirtation with a racist.When “Just for Us” ran in Washington, D.C., it became the second-highest-grossing show in Woolly Mammoth Theater’s 43-year history. Asked about this success by phone, its artistic director, Maria Manuela Goyanes, recalled telling Jewish staff members: “Y’all show up.”But unlike current Broadway shows that explore antisemitism like “Parade” or “Leopoldstadt,” Edelman isn’t looking back at the past but toward the identity politics of the moment. One reason “Just for Us” has resonated with audiences is that it’s one of the few new shows to dig into the relationship between Jews and whiteness. “Growing up I always wanted to be white,” Edelman says in the show. This gets a laugh because he presents as white, but not all groups see him that way, which he called “almost a founding tension” of the show.After one performance, an audience member told Edelman he always thought Jews were white until he saw the show. Someone behind him responded that they always thought Jews weren’t white. Edelman looked pleased by this exchange. “It’s the induction of doubt,” he explained to me, adding that he told them: “You’re both right.”Edelman at the Comedy Cellar, where he continues to work out jokes.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesHis instinct is to question, not answer, to air strong opinions but not settle into them too securely. When Kanye West comes up in our conversation, Edelman described a Jewish friend who resented the expectation that he should be outraged by the rapper’s trafficking in Jewish stereotypes, describing it as “taking our turn on the victim wheel.” In our talk, Edelman articulated this position with passion but didn’t go so far as to agree. His point is that his show aims to “have the conversation about Jews in their place on that spectrum of whiteness without having a conversation about victimhood.”Growing up in Boston, the child of a professor of biomedical engineering and a real estate lawyer, Edelman, who has a slight build and floppy hair, has been doing stand-up since he was a teenager. (He has had long-term romantic relationships with the female comics Katherine Ryan and more recently, Hannah Einbinder, though they broke up a month ago.) He describes his early influences as “not great,” explaining that “if I’m being honest, I saw a lot of racist comedy, self-congratulatory and smug.” He described discovering his voice when he went to London during college, and recalled one key turning point when the British comic Josie Long took him aside and said, “What you’re doing is getting laughs but it’s not who you are.”Even more important, at 23, he met Brace at Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s birthday party. They talked comedy and Brace later asked him if he could give him notes. Brace was especially alert to the dramaturgy of a show, insisting on cutting jokes that worked if they weren’t worth the lost momentum. If Edelman riffed too much, Brace told him: You’re on the jazz tonight. Their running conversations continued over the next decade.In early June, I accompanied Edelman to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center to watch old recordings of Broadway performances by artists like Billy Crystal (who also gave him a note after a show) and Eric Bogosian. When a man at the desk told him that he could see “The Producers” only with the approval of its director, Susan Stroman, and she was in London, Edelman looked down at his phone, shot off a text and within a minute had her approval. The man at the desk looked surprised, then added that he also needed the approval of Robin Wagner, the show’s set designer, and he had died the previous week. After a pregnant pause, Edelman deadpanned: “That’s beyond my ability.”When asked about how he seems to know everyone, Edelman said these were all people he approached because he was genuinely curious about them. “The thing everyone says but maybe doesn’t internalize is: You just have to show up,” he explained, before adding that there is privilege in knowing you are able to do so.The previous month, when in Boston, he knocked on the door of the 94-year-old comedy legend Tom Lehrer, whom he did not know, just to talk. “I told him I was a comedian,” Edelman reported. “And he said, ‘What problem do you need solving?’”In a more critical example of showing up, Edelman approached Mike Birbiglia in 2019. “We had an older brother, younger brother relationship,” Birbiglia said by phone. “He’d ask to pick my brain and I’d say I’m very busy.”This time, however, when Edelman described “Just for Us,” Birbiglia heard a surprising, relatable story that had more potential. He told Edelman to keep working on it. After producing one performance, Birbiglia, who is not Jewish, encouraged him to strengthen its spine. With a chuckle, he recalled that one note was to make it more Jewish.Edelman returned to London and he and Brace rebuilt the show as controversy raged in the Labour Party there over its leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attitudes toward Jews, which Edelman said informed the writing. After opening Off Broadway in 2021 to rave reviews, “Just for Us” became a hit.With Brace gone, Edelman said he had leaned on Birbiglia more, both for notes and emotional support. When I asked Birbiglia what Edelman was good at besides comedy, he said with a small snort: “Newspaper interviews.” Later that night, he texted me that “one of Alex’s remarkable talents is he’s willing to continue to rewrite and experiment on a show that had already reviewed well” at festivals like the Edinburgh Fringe. “That’s a very rare quality,” the text continued, “and I think it bodes well for whatever he chooses to do next.”That has been on Edelman’s mind. He had planned to make his follow-up about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject he has been fascinated by since he was a kid, but doing so without Brace seemed daunting.And yet, there was something about the cantankerous impossibility of this dispute that clearly appeals to him. One of the first things Edelman told me in our interview was: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”He thought it was from the playwright George Bernard Shaw, but reconsidered, brow furrowed, then looked it up on his phone and realized it was from the poet William Butler Yeats. “I have so much doubt,” he said, “which is why I have so much patience for both sides of the argument.” More

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    Mike Birbiglia Can’t Get ‘Hadestown’ Out of His Head

    The comedian, 44, discussed his one-man Broadway show that opens this month, his love for Taylor Swift and why he doesn’t actually hate the Y.M.C.A.Mike Birbiglia has found that he can make a living off a personal crisis. Since 2008, Birbiglia, a longtime comedian and more recently an indie film director and star, has performed stand-up comedy shows on and off Broadway about his struggles with sleepwalking, his recovery from bladder cancer and his path toward fatherhood. But his latest, “The Old Man & the Pool,” a monologue about confronting his own mortality, might be among his most candid. (The show opens on Broadway Nov. 13 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.)“I think I’m inclined toward autobiography because so much is based on passion,” Birbiglia, 44, said in a recent call from his home in Brooklyn. “I’m interested in paying tribute to the bizarre litany of things that have almost killed me.”The idea for the new show, which Birbiglia has been developing since 2018, sprang from an annual medical checkup in 2017, when his results on a breathing test were so weak that his doctor thought he might be experiencing a heart attack right there in the examination room. Birbiglia, whose father and grandfather had heart attacks at 56, was pushed to improve his health; the show details trips to the Y.M.C.A. pool as well as an encounter with an unclothed older man in the locker room when he was 7. “I’m in much better shape now,” said Birbiglia, who is also set to appear alongside Tom Hanks in the upcoming comedy-drama “A Man Called Otto,” in theaters Dec. 25. “I do cardio five days a week. I’m experimenting with the idea of riding a bike from my apartment in Brooklyn to Lincoln Center every day for work.”In an interview last month, Birbiglia discussed what turned him on to Taylor Swift, how reading poetry helps his joke writing, and why he doesn’t actually hate the Y.M.C.A. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Jerrod Carmichael: Rothaniel” Jerrod is a performer who’s not filtering what he’s saying to please you — he’s not holding back from what his truth is. A lot of art will stick with me a week after, but the things I most cherish stick with me a month after, years after. “Rothaniel” had that effect. It feels like “Hadestown” — I saw it a few years ago and still play the cast album all the time.2. Deep Dives This is something my wife, Jenny, and I like to do together — start from a certain point and then follow where it leads you, through various streaming and YouTube rabbit holes. One of my favorite finds is this three-part British documentary series called “Unknown Chaplin” that shows the outtakes of Charlie Chaplin’s movies. He did hundreds of takes of some of his shots! It’s one of those moments when there’s a massive upside to streaming — I don’t think I’d be able to find stuff like this if it weren’t for all the streaming services.3. “Little Astronaut” by J. Hope Stein This is a gorgeous book of poems by my wife about her experience being pregnant and having a child. Jen’s really gotten me into poetry — she’s introduced me to Paul Muldoon, Ada Limón, Paige Lewis. I learn so much from reading poetry that’s helpful when I’m writing films, standup and solo shows. There’s a real focus on the economy of words.4. “Kitbull” My daughter is 7 and not in the head space of wanting to engage with full-on Pixar feature films yet, but there are all these incredible shorts on Disney+. Some of our favorites are “Forky Asks a Question,” “Purl” and Rosana Sullivan’s “Kitbull,” about a kid and a pit bull becoming friends — if you don’t cry during “Kitbull,” I don’t think you’re a human being.5. Sarah Sherman on “S.N.L.” Sarah is an absolutely original voice in comedy. I worked alongside her at the Comedy Cellar, and even as a live performer she’s astonishingly alive and present and goes where the audience takes her. She has a series of guest segments with Colin Jost on “S.N.L.” that are all just excuses for her to roast him. She basically decontextualizes everything he says, then he’ll defend himself and she’ll put up a fake headline that says like “Hamptons Homeowner Colin Jost Mocks Comedian” with a picture of what’s supposed to be his mansion. They’re phenomenal.6. The Comedy Cellar For my money, the Comedy Cellar is the best club in the world. There’s the Olive Tree upstairs, which has phenomenal Middle Eastern food — great hummus and kebabs, a fantastic bar. Then downstairs is an intimate 150-seat club — the other night I was there, and Ray Romano dropped in. You have to make reservations weeks in advance, but it’s worth it.7. Improv is Life The principles of “Yes, and” apply to everything I do: directing movies, making solo shows and working with a director, collaborating with a designer, working on a family trip to Iceland. That spirit of things is what I find to be on a daily basis the most helpful piece of education I’ve ever had.8. rev’pod I talk a lot about my sleepwalking in my shows — I jumped through a second-story window many years ago — and people always ask what I do about the issue. At first my doctor said to sleep in a sleeping bag, and I did that for a while, but then I found this thing! The idea is for a cozier sleep; it’s kind of like a cocoon cloth experience. They recommend it for flying on an airplane to avoid germs. It’s not foolproof, but I find it to be a pretty good solution.9. No More Art Snobbery In my 40s, I’ve vowed not to be snobby about art that’s popular — there are certain things I’ve just missed out on because they were and I didn’t think they could be good. With early Taylor Swift, I was kind of like, “Oh, that’s pop music, that’s maybe not for me.” But her music is wildly personal and evocative and exciting in a way that even if she weren’t the massive pop star that she was, I think she’d have a massive cult following that she would tour from.10. Y.M.C.A. I make fun of it mercilessly in my show — there’s too much chlorine, a lot of cringey nudity in the locker rooms, the towels are too small. But a bunch of the New York Y.M.C.A. administrators ended up coming to the workshop shows a few years ago at Cherry Lane, and they were fans of it! I do a thing on my podcast called “Working It Out for a Cause,” and I’ve given to the Y.M.C.A. a handful of times. Part of it is because the more I researched the Y.M.C.A., the more I realized not only are they a rec facility, they do an extraordinary amount of community outreach and great nonprofit work. I’m very impressed by them; I make fun because I love. More

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    Mike Birbiglia to Return to Broadway With a New Show This Fall

    The comedic storyteller, who previously brought a solo show to Broadway in 2018, has a new act for a new age.Mike Birbiglia, the comedic storyteller who has mined his experiences with romance, fatherhood and sleep disorders for narrative purposes, will return to Broadway this fall with a new show prompted by swimming.Birbiglia has been developing the show, called “The Old Man & the Pool,” through a series of performances over the last year at venues including Berkeley Repertory Theater in California, Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and Center Theater Group in Los Angeles.The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Oct. 28 and to open on Nov. 13 at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center.Birbiglia, 44, previously appeared on Broadway in his solo show “The New One,” which had a two-month run that began performances in 2018.“The last show was, in some ways, about birth, and this show, in some ways, is about death, through the storytelling lens of hitting middle age and realizing that our bodies are slowly in decline,” Birbiglia said. “The most crucial thing about it is that it’s funny — it goes to the darkest places about life and death for hopefully 90 minutes of laughs, where at the end of it people feel better on the way out than when they came in.”“The Old Man & the Pool” is directed by Seth Barrish, a frequent Birbiglia collaborator who also directed “The New One,” and includes contributions from Ira Glass, the “This American Life” host, who executive produced “The New One.”Birbiglia said he has felt “euphoric” about returning to in-person performing after the pandemic shutdown, when, he said, he worried about the future of the form. “It’s almost like before the pandemic, entertainment was elective, and now it’s essential,” he said.And why Broadway? “I’ve always thought of the shows as solo plays, somewhere between storytelling and theater and comedy,” he said. “What happens with Broadway, in addition to these being some of the best theaters in the world physically and sonically and in all the technical ways, there are some people who only pay attention to Broadway, so that’s meaningful. It opens up the aperture to more people, and that’s the really the goal.”Although Lincoln Center Theater is a nonprofit organization, this show is a commercial venture produced by Sue Wagner, John Johnson, Patrick Catullo and Seaview, a production company founded by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea. More