The audience laughs very quickly at the anecdotes of the New York comedian Alex Edelman. There’s one about a gorilla mourning the death of Robin Williams and another about horses. They aren’t really connected except by Alex’s lively delivery as he strides about the stage. He even gets a laugh from describing his jokes as dumb and small.
They may work with his audience, but a friend tells him he should be doing something political with his routine that helps the audience understand the horrors of the world.
His immediate response to that was to compare the idea to attending a party and announcing that he was going to read a poem. Some things are just not done.
However he receives a tweet that invites people to join an in-person meeting in Queens to explore their whiteness. Suspecting a white racist gathering, he mischievously decides to pop along. After all, he is white. Jewish but white.
The ninety-minute show dips in and out of that event held in someone’s apartment. He eats a white muffin and is even rather attracted to a girl he meets there. They do a lot of complaining, don’t like the idea of Prince Harry marrying Meghan Markle and they worried about white history supposedly being erased.
Although he does a lot of nodding, they soon realise he is Jewish and eject him from the room. There isn’t much that is political about his account of the trip, but it gets a good bit of laughter. So do the sidetracks he makes into anecdotes about his Orthodox Jewish heritage, his family's celebration of Christmas and why he is irritated by Jared Kushner, the one-time senior advisor to Donald Trump.
The show may be light and apolitical but it’s likely that Alex’s political friend would have laughed along with the rest of the audience.