Alex Edelman

Alex Edelman is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, and Broadway book writer, born on March 20, 1989, in Boston, Massachusetts. He was raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, in a modern Orthodox Jewish family. His mother, Cheryl, is a real estate lawyer, and his father, Elazer R. Edelman, is a biomedical engineer, cardiologist, and professor. He has two brothers, Austin and Adam Edelman, the latter a competitive skeleton athlete who represented Israel at the Olympics. Edelman attended Maimonides School in Brookline, a modern Orthodox Jewish day school, and began performing stand-up comedy at the age of fifteen. Following graduation, he spent a year studying at a yeshiva in Jerusalem, during which time he helped establish the city's first comedy club, Off the Wall Comedy. He relocated to New York City in 2008 to study English at New York University, graduating in 2012, and continued performing stand-up throughout his college years, eventually joining the Upright Citizens Brigade.

Edelman's international career took shape when he first performed in the United Kingdom in 2012 while studying abroad. At the 2014 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, his show Millennial earned him the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer, making him the first American to receive that distinction since Arj Barker won it in 1997. He followed that with Everything Handed to You at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe, which ranked as the second most well-reviewed show at that year's festival. His third touring show, Just for Us, was nominated for the Best Show award at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe and toured from 2018 to 2020 before returning in 2023 and 2024. Edelman made his Australian debut in 2015 and has appeared on numerous British television programs, including The John Bishop Show, Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled, Live from the BBC, and Roast Battle. He also contributed anecdotes to the 2015 book Off the Mic by Deborah Frances-White and Marsha Shandur, and recorded multiple BBC Radio 4 series, among them Alex Edelman's Peer Group, which ran from 2017 to 2021, and Alex Edelman's Special Relationships in 2018.

Just for Us opened Off-Broadway in 2022 before transferring to Broadway in 2023 at the Hudson Theatre, where Edelman served as both performer and book writer. The New York Times named it a Critic's Pick on both occasions. The show earned Edelman a Tony Award Special Award in 2024 as well as an Emmy Award. A filmed version of the production was released on Max in 2024. That same year, Edelman was included on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

As a television writer, Edelman contributed to the American series The Great Indoors from 2016 to 2017 and Teenage Bounty Hunters in 2020. He served as head writer for Saturday Night Seder, a virtual celebrity Passover seder produced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and separately worked with rabbis to incorporate humor into High Holiday services as part of a broader Jewish communal response to the pandemic. As an actor, he stars as Adam Cooper in The Paper, a Peacock mockumentary series based on The Office, on which he is also credited as a writer. He appeared in the 2024 Netflix film Unfrosted. Outside of entertainment, Edelman has worked for both the Boston Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers.