The Jewish community these days can feel like a ship navigating treacherous seas, taking on water, pitching sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, leaving all of us on board a little queasy.
But a handful of comedians have taken the helm and found humor in our insane times. They’re articulating what seems impossible to put into words and giving us a chance to breathe, reflect, find community, and maybe most important, to keep laughing.
Natan Badalov is one of those comedians. He has a gift for finding laughter in experiences that have turned our world upside down. But his talent extends far beyond these difficult topics. As a storyteller, he’s b’ramot (on another level).
Natan arrived in the United States at age two with his family. They were Jewish refugees from Uzbekistan, a newly independent Central Asian nation where the Jewish community was experiencing a period of upheaval after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Growing up as a Bukharian Jew in New York City, he often felt like an outsider in his Jewish day school community.
Natan was drawn to comedy as a way to process his experiences – from his mother’s insistence that he get married, to dating a rabbi, to a complex relationship with Jewish identity. But after October 7, he witnessed fellow comedians embrace rhetoric that was hostile to the Jewish community. He wasn’t afraid to call them out, and his comedy took a new turn.
Natan didn’t expect what happened next. Jewish audience members began telling him that his comedy made them feel seen, understood and less alone. Natan found himself thinking differently about the community from which he’d once felt alienated.
Now touring with a new show, he’s making it a priority to give back. This Thursday, October 22, Natan will bring Community Service: A Show About Showing Up to Red Room Comedy Club in Chicago. Natan kindly spoke with me by phone about the experiences that brought him to this point, the show’s inspirations, and what to do – and what not to do – when the world seems to have lost its mind.
IN THE BEGINNING
Teme: What is your comedy origin story?
Natan: I started going to open mics in 2016. For almost a year I would just watch, which was way too long. I remember signing up a couple of times and I just chickened out. It got to the point where people recognized me as the guy they never saw go up.
Eventually I went up at Stand Up New York and I bombed real bad. I didn’t remember a single story or joke that I wanted to tell. Instead, I remember saying “What’s up?” to everyone that was at the open mic. I’m like, “Are you guys doing good? You doing good?” And then I just walked off.
Teme: How did you finally convince yourself to go up?
Natan: I bullied myself. “Stop being a bitch. Stop intellectualizing it. You need to go up. If not, then you’re wasting your time. Who the fuck hangs out for a year in the back of bars at open mics in the shittiest conditions possible? The only reason you would want to go through that is if you actually cared about it. You want to do this, so do it.”
I think I built it up too much because I really wanted to be good at it. It’s one of those things where you don’t know what you’re getting into until you actually start doing it. You can watch all the documentaries and specials you want, but there’s no replacement for doing it.
Teme: What drew you to comedy?
Natan: I always thought I was funny, but looking back, it was just a good way to express myself. I was trying to figure myself out and to use comedy as a way to do that in terms of my background going to yeshiva and stuff like that.
In the beginning, I was just trying to figure out how to write a joke. Then something clicked. Once you figure out how to tell a joke and the structure of it, you’re like, “All right, you figured that out. So now what do you want to say?” My style is autobiographical. Recently it’s been about my religion.
Teme: What is your writing process?
Natan: I ask myself, “How do you feel about this topic?” I talk it out and probably will bomb and then I go back to it and add punches or act-outs or other things in between. I find that my voice is already pretty monotone, and I think if I try to go into memorization, I would literally sound like an Ambien. I always get self-conscious about my voice. So now what I do is if I feel a certain way, the feeling will make me more animated. If I’m frustrated with something, then my frustration will make my voice change and make me act out whoever I’m talking about.
Teme: I think you sound very Zen and it’s great.
TURNING POINTS
Teme: When did Judaism and your family background begin finding their way into your comedy?
Natan: I remember the first chunk of material I wrote that people really connected with. It was about my mom pressuring me to get married. That’s such a common experience in Jewish households and immigrant households.
I didn’t even feel like I was telling jokes. I was just like, “This is actually happening in my life. Here is a conversation that I had with my mother.” After the show, people came up to me and said, “That happened to me!” – and that’s a good sign that you’re talking about something people want to hear more about.
In the beginning, I also didn’t know how to talk about Judaism because I’m Bukharian, and most people don’t know what that means. A lot of people don’t even know what Jews are. I’ve toured in the South, and people believed things that were almost cartoonish. No one believed Jews had horns or any bullshit like that, but people genuinely believe these conspiracy theories.
So for them to believe that, and then I add the whole, “I’m Bukharian” … they would’ve had no idea what I’m talking about. But it slowly crept in. I’d dated a rabbi as well, and I talked about that at one point. Then, especially after October 7, some of the things I would hear onstage from my own peers made me think, “This is fucking insane.”
I started feeling a lot of anger, and I was like, “Well, if no one else is saying this, I might as well say it, and I don’t really care anymore.”
At the time, I was very broke and not in a good place. But I was also like, “What’s the point of me doing stand-up if I can’t say what I really want to say?”
So I started talking about what was going on and how it affected me. I was surprised by how much people connected with it because that wasn’t my intention. I was just angry, and I wanted to say how I felt. That’s how you find your voice. You start talking about how you feel about things. If you do that as a starting point, you get closer to finding out what you really want to say onstage, rather than telling jokes that anybody else can write.
Teme: Hearing you talk about what the Jewish community is going through has actually helped me a lot. I don’t feel alone. I feel seen. I don’t feel crazy for having these emotions.
Natan: I felt that a lot from audiences. It was interesting to see people say things like that after a show because that was also something I never expected. Comedians get into comedy to be funny and to get all the attention. When you hear people saying, “I feel heard. I feel seen” … I had no idea my comedy could affect people in this way. The intention is always just be funny. My show is not a rally. There’s no pro-Israel rally.
Teme: I really appreciate how your comedy helps me cope with the hostility coming at the Jewish community. How do you cope with those things?
Natan: In the beginning, when I would do shows with other comics, I was literally watching them get propagandized in real time. They were thinking with emotion. If they feel a certain way, they feel like it’s true. It gets kind of weird because if you can make someone laugh at a false premise, people believe it to be true. You could just say a lie and have a good punchline at the end of it, and people will believe it.
I see comics who are outright lying onstage, but because they’re so famous, and because people will laugh at anything they say, people believe what they’re saying. They go, “Well, he’s a smart person.” Well, smart people can also be stupid in certain moments, and they can also not know things.
I was watching a lot of my peers say this outright bullshit, and I would always follow them onstage and waste my time yelling at them about how wrong they were. I wouldn’t even try to make people laugh. After all the anger, I realized nothing changed and I was wasting my time.
Then two things happened. One was that I was talking to a comic who’s an anti-Zionist Jew. We would always follow each other onstage and we would always talk against each other.
At one point, he messaged me on Instagram and started saying, “I don’t agree with what you’re saying.” I told him, “I don’t do conversations on Instagram. If you want to talk, let’s have a coffee and we’ll talk.”
He agreed. We went to get coffee. We talked. I heard what he said. He heard what I said, and I felt like I got through to him. I leaned across the table and said, “You see where I’m coming from, right?” And he’s like, “Yeah.”
I felt it was a good conversation. The next week, I saw that he was posting the same bullshit he was posting before. And I was like, “What was the point? I just wasted my time with this guy.”
And then the second thing was that I was getting so stressed out with what was going on that I was losing hair from my beard. I was getting stress patches. It was literally like God telling me, “You need to shut the fuck up. You need to move on from this.”
Going back to your question about how to deal with all these emotions, I kept going to Jewish spaces. I used to have a lot of resentment towards Judaism and American Jews because of [discriminatory] stuff that happened in Yeshiva. But recently I caught up with one of my teachers and I told him my feelings about it. He said, “You know what you should do? Go to Jewish events where the intention is positive.” For example, don’t go to Holocaust memorials. Obviously go to them, but don’t only go to those kinds of things. Go to celebratory events where Judaism is the foundation because then your brain will associate Judaism with a positive connotation.
Since all this stuff has been happening, I’ve been trying to do that more. Some of them were pretty bad, but some have been good. But these are the growing pains of trying to be in a new community. I’ve seen some negatives, like people take advantage of people in need in the Jewish community. But I’ve also met some good people that I’ve connected with.
COMMUNITY SERVICE
Teme: How did you come up with the title “Community Service”?
Natan: My first special was about identity. The second was about family. This one’s about community. It’s about when I was a kid, when I went to yeshiva, the other communities I was a part of, and how I connect with the Jewish community now.
The whole idea of community service is giving back. That’s the theme of the show. It’s about my attachment towards the Jewish community in general and giving back with this show.
This show actually was canceled. I don’t know if you know.
Teme: I didn’t!
Natan: The first time I tried to do this show, it was in New York, and it was canceled by the venue. The venue was getting complaints about the poster from patrons who were saying it was a call to action to support Israel.
At the time, I was still working out the show. As I was writing, I thought, “What could the hook be for this show?” And then I realized, “This is the hook”, and it was happening in real time as I was writing it.
I asked what specifically should be changed about the show. The owner was like, “The poster, it’s blue and white. People are getting put off by the blue and white.” I’m like, “Oh, you want me to put red, black, and green instead?”
But what I liked about what happened was that I didn’t know how much support I would get. I talked to people about it. I genuinely didn’t know that people would care.
Sometimes you just live your life and you don’t really think you’re part of a community. You walk around like, “Yeah, I’m just myself.” But when certain things happen in your life, you realize who’s on your side.
Teme: I forget that, too. I can feel really alone doom-scrolling at midnight.
Natan: Yeah, it’s better always not to be on the phone. Also, truly, what can we do about this? You’re on your phone, you read “People Want to Kill Jews in 500 Different Ways.” Now you’re outside and the weather’s nice, but you’re scared. So now your day is ruined until this anxiety wears off, but the weather was nice the whole day.
If something drastic is happening, of course I’m going to address it. But these little things, these little arguments—I need to live my life. Everybody needs to live their life. To hang on to every single thing that these people are saying, that’s what they want and it never ends.
One thing I don’t like is that some of these Jewish content creators and people in the entertainment space profit off that fear. They see what Mamdani and AOC and all these other people are doing, and they make these reaction videos. They’re in business because of people evoking fear.
I got some criticism after I called out the expensive galas where the whole intention is to bring awareness to antisemitism. As if we’re not aware. These tickets are thousands of dollars. Rich Jews just giving other rich Jews money, but nothing is solved.
This is one of the criticisms where people say, “Why are you saying this?” I’m like, “Then prove me wrong. Tell me something that this movement has done, that these galas have accomplished.”
Teme: I never thought about that, but you make a good point. Those events were happening long before October 7th, and didn’t change what happened.
Natan: No, not at all. If anything, all this money should go to a fund for broke Jewish kids, like when I was a kid, and just give them free Jewish education. Not necessarily religious, but one that’s instilling Jewish values or Jewish culture.
I was a broke kid. My mother was a single mom. She couldn’t afford the tuition. We had a scholarship. There are kids that probably didn’t even know these opportunities existed. When you’re broke, you just assume you don’t have access. Then this leads to you not thinking you’re part of this community, which is something that I felt.
I felt like I wasn’t part of the Jewish community for a very long time because of classism, because of subtle racism, because of being Bukharian. These are the criticisms that I talk about in this show. I don’t know how people will react to it, but at this point, I need to say this because this is how I feel. I haven’t really gotten much pushback on stage so far, which I was surprised by. But everybody agrees when it comes to classism.
When I was starting comedy I thought, “I’m not going to be touching that topic at all.” Because of all the stuff I experienced, I don’t even want their acceptance or approval or even acknowledgement. The feeling and the wound are still open if you think that way. And you can’t judge a whole group of people based on your childhood. But it’s also part of the show how I view the Jewish community differently now. I find that they’re a lot more supportive than they were when I was a kid. Maybe it could be because of me not knowing, maybe I was a kid and I didn’t see how they were helping, but now I’m an adult.
Teme: It’s so important for Jewish kids to have a chance to feel connected to their community. There are so many people out there who don’t know who Jews are at all and who want to define it for us.
Natan: It’s not our responsibility to make those people know us. It’s on them to want to engage with us. I don’t give a shit anymore. It’s not on me to prove that I’m one of the good ones. I refuse that obligation.
I came to this conclusion by realizing that the foundation is being part of a community that will accept you. People who don’t find that, especially anti-Zionist Jews, look for it somewhere else. They have no connection towards the Jewish community. They’re like, why would I defend a group that I don’t connect with?
Teme: There doesn’t seem to be any actual way to resolve that at this point or make it better.
Natan: It’s not for you to solve. I remember feeling so frustrated on stage. I felt like it was up to me to talk about this stuff and try to figure out what the solution is. I’m a comedian. You have to know what your place is in society and just help the way you can help. At the end of the day, it’s not your responsibility. I’m not an advocate. I’m not an activist. I’m a comedian. I don’t like the label of “activist” because it puts a whole other expectation onto comedians. It’s too limiting.
There’s always a cynicism in the back of my head where I feel what I do isn’t that important. But when I hear messages from people saying they feel seen, it’s like “Oh, I guess this is important to some people.”
Teme: What do you hope the show’s audience will leave with?
Natan: First, laughs and thinking it’s funny. I hope they’ll leave with the sense that we will be fine, although I don’t think I have that power to quell Jewish anxiety. I don’t think anyone does.
LAUGHING MATTERS
Teme: Do you have a favorite story about a show?
Natan: My uncle was the first family member who came to see me perform. I was in Boca doing a show in Florida. I was nervous and I usually don’t get nervous, but I was nervous with him because he’s a family member.
But it went well. I asked my friend, “Did he actually laugh? Or did he only tell me he did?” And my friend said, “He laughed. He liked it.” That was good for me. You bomb in front of your family, you’re never going to hear the end of it. My friend could also have been lying to me, but I would just take the lie. I couldn’t live with him thinking I suck.
Teme: Has an audience member’s response ever particularly stayed with you?
Natan: After a show in Baltimore, someone messaged me that he came to my show just thinking he would get some laughs, but hearing about my mom and my life experience really resonated with him and, like you said, he wrote about feeling seen. It was a really long message. I never had anyone write anything like that. I really appreciated it.
Teme: What’s bringing you joy in the midst of these crazy times?
Natan: I don’t know about joy because my goal is just being stress-free. Contentedness. Honestly, the shows. Just looking forward to having shows to do and making people laugh makes me feel good. Being able to do comedy and make a living off of it brings me joy. And being able to say what I want to say without having to ask anyone, it really makes me feel a lot more open. And to have people who want to listen to it.
Teme: What’s something you know based on your unique experience that other people might not know?
Natan: That Jews aren’t white. Jews come in all colors. Also, stop reading the news and travel. The last time I went to Israel, this couple came up to me. They asked me some stuff, and I asked them, “Why did you come to Israel?”
They said, “We keep hearing about it. We hear all these negative things, but we wanted to see it for ourselves.”
And I go, “Are you guys Muslim? Jewish?”
They said, “No, we’re just Catholics from Alabama. The first time we came to Israel, we went to Jerusalem. We saw Jews of all colors.”
I’m looking at them and asked, “Well, what did you think you were going to see?”
They said, “We genuinely didn’t know.”
I think if more people take that couple’s mentality towards not only Jews, but towards life in general, to make an honest effort to go and see things for themselves, it’ll build a lot more bridges and make people have a lot more empathy towards each other.
Natan Badalov is at Red Room Comedy Club, 7442 N Western Ave, Chicago, on Thursday, October 22 at 7:30 p.m. With Rebecca Joey Schwab.
Tickets HERE
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