Jacqueline Novak, the comedian who made philosophy out of desire and earned an Emmy for it

Jacqueline Novak

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	September 3, 1982 Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Occupation	Comedian and Author
Known for	A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Awards	Drama Desk Award , Outstanding Solo Performance (nomination) · Emmy (nomination)

There is a version of Jacqueline Novak that a publicist might describe in three words: comedian, author, podcaster. That version would be accurate and nearly useless. The one that matters came to attention through a 75-minute show about oral sex — or, more precisely, about the way a single physical act can become the organizing principle for a complete philosophical inquiry. The show, titled Get On Your Knees, lasted seven years, sold out theaters on two continents, and eventually earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special.

Novak grew up in Chappaqua, New York, the youngest of three children in a household that held her mother’s Jewish heritage alongside her father’s corporate pragmatism. She graduated from Georgetown University in 2004, where she found her early comedic footing inside an improv troupe that also happened to include John Mulaney and Nick Kroll — a coincidence that reads better as scene-setting than as explanation, because nothing about Novak’s subsequent career follows the trajectory those names suggest. Georgetown gave her a peer group; it did not give her a path. The path she found was distinctly her own.

Her first substantial public work came not from the stage but from the page. In 2016, she published How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings on Depression from One Who Knows — an anti-self-help guide that combined memoir with something closer to comic philosophy. Where most books about mental health in that period worked toward resilience through a redemption arc, Novak was interested in the texture of depression itself: the daily negotiations, the specific absurdities, the ways the language of wellness fails the people it purports to serve. Mike Birbiglia, who would later produce her Off-Broadway show, called her “one of the next great stars in comedy” at the book’s release. That description was accurate and, in retrospect, understated.

Get On Your Knees premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2018, then opened Off-Broadway at Cherry Lane Theatre in July 2019 — directed by John Early, with Birbiglia producing and Natasha Lyonne as executive producer. The show received New York Times recognition in two year-end lists simultaneously: “Best Theater of 2019” and “Best Comedy of 2019.” It ran through six extensions. It sold out London runs at the Soho Theatre and Leicester Square Theatre. It earned a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Solo Performance in 2020. In a comedy landscape that prizes relatability and speed, Novak was making something slow, dense, and unapologetically intellectual.

Get On Your Knees is often described as a blowjob show, which is accurate in the way that Hamlet is a ghost story. Novak’s subject is sexuality, but her method is closer to literary criticism than stand-up: she treats desire as a text, reads it slowly, annotates it, changes her mind mid-sentence. Some audiences find this revelatory; others find it precious. The show earned rapturous reviews from publications that do not normally cover stand-up comedy, which is either evidence of its unusual ambition or an index of what passes for transgression in the literary-theater world. The Emmy nomination suggests the former; the fact that it took six years and a streaming platform to reach a wider audience suggests both.

The Netflix special — Jacqueline Novak: Get On Your Knees, released January 23, 2024 — is the final performance of the touring show, filmed at The Town Hall Theater in New York and directed by Lyonne in what press described as a concert film meets comedy special. The Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special, announced later that year, confirmed what the Off-Broadway run had argued for years: that Novak’s text — the actual words, the construction, the argument — was the central thing.

Her ongoing project with actor and comedian Kate Berlant, the podcast Poog, has run since 2020 and landed on TIME’s list of the ten best podcasts of 2021 and on the New York Times list of best podcasts in 2025. The show works adjacent territory — investigating, often skeptically, the rituals and promises of wellness culture from a position that is both genuinely curious and constitutionally amused. It extends what How to Weep in Public began: an inquiry into the language through which people narrate their own care.

Born September 3, 1982, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Novak is currently on tour with new material — her first fresh show since Get On Your Knees concluded its run. The 2026 North American dates mark the moment a comedian who once spent seven years on a single idea decides, deliberately, to begin again. What she finds next is the open question.

Tags: actors, stand-up comedy, comedians, Natasha Lyonne, Kate Berlant, Get On Your Knees