How a Kentucky-raised comic dodged a beer can and became a Jewish star
Comedian Ariel Elias dished on her new special and how to skip the line at her favorite cooldown spot
Ariel Elias’ debut special, A Jewish Star is out now on YouTube. Photo by Dillon Tanner
By PJ Grisar August 11, 2025
Comedian Ariel Elias thinks the public pool in Astoria Park — her favorite place — is a serviceable metaphor for New York City.
“It’s free, it’s like, totally accessible for anybody, but it’s a pain in the ass, but if you know the shortcut, you can get in faster,” said Elias, who has called Astoria, Queens, home since 2016, living near the park with her husband and their pitbull, Bobbi, short for Baba Ghanoush.
The pool draws all kinds of people, but, every now and then, “everybody’s time is ruined because somebody shits.”
Elias was sitting criss-cross-apple-sauce on the concrete platform overlooking the Olympic-sized pool, flanked by the Triborough Bridge and the Hell Gate. She wore a dark T-shirt spoofing the Nike logo. (It said “NOLA” and the swoosh took the shape of a saxophone; Elias studied sax at Tulane in New Orleans before jaw problems ended that ambition.)
There weren’t many in the pool on a balmy August day. Elias said that’s because they were cleaning it. People were queuing up for when it would reopen. Her life hack: If you show up “swim-ready,” with just your bathing suit and towel, you can jump the line.
It’s not surprising that Elias, 36, knows the secret. Growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, she harbored a specific knowledge unknown to her peers: What it’s like to be Jewish. That and the pronunciation of her name, Ariel — like the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon — not as Kentuckians are wont to say, “Earl,” like Jason Lee’s title character in My Name is Earl.
Elias’ first hourlong special, A Jewish Star, released July 15 on YouTube, lovingly skewers the Christian environs of her youth, where an acquaintance, spying her Magen David necklace, remarked, as one might while observing the last Thylacine in captivity “a real-life Jew!”
Is this outsider status where she got the comedy bug? Only partly.
Humor is intrinsic to being Jewish, she says, in part because of oral tradition — and, at least at her family Seders growing up — the need for elegant variation.
“When you tell the same story over and over again, especially over a meal and wine, you start punching it up,” Elias said. “We would all make snarky little comments at our Seder. And it became sort of like, who could outdo each other to be the funniest one at the table.”
At school and in the community, her novelty meant she was getting asked a lot of the same questions.
“You get tired of saying the same thing, and so you try to find a quick and succinct and funny way to explain yourself, and I think that’s a lot of what stand-up is,” Elias said.
As her debut special, A Jewish Star functions as Elias’ introduction as a Jew from the Bluegrass State. It’s also a way to meet an audience on her own terms, a few years after a viral moment brought her into the spotlight.
On Oct, 8, 2022, Elias was performing at a New Jersey comedy club, Uncle Vinnie’s in Point Pleasant Beach, when a woman inferred, “by her jokes” that she had voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
“Why would you ask me that question when you know I’m the only Jew in the room?” Elias responded. “Are you trying to get me killed?”
As the heckler got up to leave, her partner chucked a full beer can in Elias’ direction. Elias was briefly stunned, but bounced back with elan by chugging the can. The incident and its publicity paved the way for a performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
For a long time Elias had a complicated relationship with this act of partisan violence.
Putting out the special, which ends with a staged repeat, has helped her to move past it. Now when you Google her the “beer can thing” is a bit further down on the search results.
Elias said her managers were nervous about naming her first special A Jewish Star, making the usual antisemitic trolls’ job that much easier. Elias answered, “’I have never not gotten on the internet. I’m a woman talking. Reddit hates that!”
At first the Jew from Kentucky hook was a niche she was happy to occupy — it was the first material that clicked after she started doing open mics her senior year of college in 2011 — but it’s more than a gimmick. Elias’ story is unique not just due to her upbringing in the Bible Belt, but her roots, which buck an Ashkenormative trend.
Her father’s family was expelled from Spain in 1492 and found their way to Greece before coming to the United States. (Her grandfather spoke Ladino but didn’t pass it on — she’s bummed she missed the chance to speak a dying language.)
The special goes into Elias’ application for Spanish citizenship, enabled by a 2015 law for the descendants of those forced out by the Inquisition. She suffered from bad timing, posting the news of her new nationality on social media about — captioned “today we have righted one of history’s greatest injustices” — on Jan. 6, 2021.
Looking at the state of Jewish comedy post-Oct. 7, Elias said she thinks it’s more necessary now.
“We need some joy, right?” Elias said. “And it’s nice to take a break from feeling either like you have to defend something or speak for somebody.”
She feels some pressure to voice a view on Israel, but on the topic professes to be “an idiot” who doesn’t know very much about the ins and outs of the conflict.
“I know suffering is bad,” Elias said. “And I know that empathy is not a finite resource, and I wish we all extended more of it.”
If there’s a theme in the special, which touches on Haredi Jews and subway shomer negiah and her school friends who worried she’d go to hell, it might well be her willingness to see where others are coming from. And, yes, that grace even extends to the couple who chucked a tall boy in her direction. For all their faults, the man had the back of his heckling significant other.
“Terrible people,” Elias says in the special, “but they’re a great couple.”
It was one of the worst nights of her life — but she won’t let someone else’s crap ruin her good time.
