Rachel Bloom, the award-winning musical-theater geek best known for co-creating and starring in the cult TV hit Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, can’t help it. She’s a natural, both as a comedian and as a performer. In her new 90-minute showcase, Death, Let Me Do My Show, which opened Thursday at Off Broadway’s Lucille Lortel Theatre, she offers a characteristic blend of stand-up comedy, cabaret (with her own original tunes) and meta-drama around the theme of human mortality.

The idea of death never really troubled Bloom until the pandemic, whose early weeks were marked for her by two momentous crises in March and April 2020: the birth of her daughter, who spent her first days in an L.A. hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, and the death of her longtime songwriting collaborator Adam Schlesinger, the Fountains of Wayne co-founder who was an early COVID casualty at age 52. (Death soon claimed other members of her support group, including the psychiatrist who had coached her through her grief at the onset of the pandemic and then suffered a fatal heart attack at age 44.)

Faced with so much death amid both a pandemic and her anxieties as a first-time parent, Bloom soon found herself questioning her faith — or, in her case, lack of faith. Being an atheist, she explains, is “real easy to say when your life hasn’t been touched by death. It’s a sign of privilege.” She visited a psychic and, more surprisingly, turned to prayer — even singing half-remembered Hebrew verses from the “Maoz Tsur” that Jews sing after lighting the candles during Hanukkah. She acknowledges that her experience with death came outside her immediate family circle, a touch that’s more a glancing blow than a direct hit to the solar plexus. “Even if ghosts are real,” she jokes, “I’m a low priority haunting for all the people I know who’ve died.”

And therein lies the rub. Bloom’s grief, while certainly real, sometimes feels secondhand — and her reliance on meta devices never quite give her material either heft or over-the-top hilarity. Still, Bloom is a witty narrator of her journey, quick on her feet with a timely ad-lib (as when she challenged a heckler in the audience with the quip, “Are you full on Lauren Boeberting me right now?”).

And she supplements her storytelling with clever projections (designed by Hana S. Kim) beamed onto Beowulf Boritt’s sleekly efficient set. Some of the biggest laughs come from her all-too-infrequent songs, including a showstopping send-up of Dear Evan Hansen and its reliance on the “underdog musical theater power ballad.” (Jerome Kurtenbach serves as music director.) It’s in those moments that Bloom truly shines on stage, a winsomely relatable, occasionally raunchy millennial who can goof on our shared appreciation for Broadway tunes or Space Jam or Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” as our new national anthem. In the end, classic pre-pandemic Bloom may be the most effective way to power through our collective grief over the last few years and to defy the specter of Death.