Can of Celsius. A tripod set up facing the stage. Walking past a curtain of tassels dangling from the Wilma Theater’s ceiling, Jacqueline Novak made her presence known. Novak is an American stand-up comedian, writer, and author, best known for her acclaimed one-woman show, “Get On Your Knees,” which explores philosophical meditations on sex, coming-of-age, and a certain body part in this intimate stand-up special.
As Novak wrapped up her three sold-out performances in New York, she made a stop at the Wilma Theater. “The Jacqueline Novak 2026 Tour” is a 75-minute set that moves from accepting rejection from a crush to her obsession with ghosts and the strange disproportion of the human body.
The show begins with pieces of cardboard, on which rough notes are sketched, placed on the floor. Novak first introduces an instance of being rejected by her crush. But what begins as a seemingly casual anecdote quickly reveals itself as a study in the rituals of humiliation we perform for ourselves. Novak doesn’t simply recount the experience of being turned down; she goes one step further, dissecting the micro-behaviors that follow — those small, almost second-nature gestures through which we attempt to preserve dignity. The “I’ll let you regret losing me” email she drafts, for instance, is funny not only because of its wording, but because of the fragile self-image it constructs. When that illusion of a cool “kiss off” collapses with the accident — “THE SAME EMAIL IS SENT TWICE” — the joke lands as both punchline and self-recognition. Novak’s language often circles a phrase, testing its texture before releasing it, and here the back-and-forth of “clicking the button” becomes a kind of emotional stutter. Even her body participates in this unraveling: subtle salsa steps and forward-and-back toe tapping create a rhythm of hesitation that mirrors the mental loop of second-guessing.
Moving from interpersonal rejection to existential displacement, she pivots into her obsession with ghosts: “When the body dies, the idea will be free,” she proposes, a line that hovers between sincerity and parody. Novak’s comedy thrives in this ambiguity, where philosophical premises are introduced only to be destabilized afterward. The image of a stuffed alpaca collapsing awkwardly to the ground becomes an entry point into thinking about death not as an abstraction, but as something concrete and physical. The alpaca, with its long neck and heavy body, lands in a strange position — head and feet touching the floor while its butt dangled in the air. Novak mimicked the pose physically, adding, “The way they’re lying around is unreal,” she added. Bodies, once animated by intention, become objects subject to gravity’s indifference.
Interestingly, death is often thought about as a kind of permanent sleep — one so deep that gravity seems to pull you further into the earth. This line of thinking culminates in her meditation on coffins, where the humor sharpens into critique. “So why can’t people be placed into a position where they would be if they were sleeping?” she asks, positioning one arm beneath her head and crossing her legs. Instead, bodies are arranged with limbs pressed together into a kind of obedient stillness. “Why can’t they get a dog bed coffin?” Novak asks. The question is absurd but not entirely illogical. Why not replace the rigid coffin with something softer — more human? Novak’s comedic structure is cumulative: she layers image upon image until the audience is no longer sure whether they are laughing at the absurdity or recognizing the quiet logic beneath it.
This question of bodily design threads through the latter portion of the set, where Novak turns her attention to proportion and function. “Why put all the eggs in one basket?” she asks. She invites the audience to see the human body as an inefficient, poorly engineered system. The clustering of senses in the head becomes suspect while the rest of the body is relegated to mere sensation. She dissects the length of the arm with forensic attention, arriving at the conclusion that it is “exactly crafted” for a narrow set of intimate tasks — “wipe your arse and [excite your genitals],” she notes, bundling her hand in front of her body. The humor is explicit: by describing the body as if it were a design flaw, Novak estranges the audience from their own physicality.
And she’s not finished yet: even perception becomes unstable. “The notion that if you turn, then you’re not there — there’s this imbalance of the body,” she observes. Ears still function but are oriented forward, privileging a single direction of engagement. Presence, then, is not fixed but contingent, dependent on orientation and attention.
What holds these disparate threads together is Novak’s refusal to adhere to a rigid structure. The show does not build toward a single climax so much as it accumulates, looping back on itself and deepening its own internal logic. She frequently veers off script, letting the room’s energy lift her into spontaneity and the audience’s reaction to redirect her flow of thought. At one point, she pointed toward me — an audience member seated in the front row, center — as I crouched over my tiny pocket-sized notebook, scribbling down thoughts for this article. “We seem to have a journalist in the front?” she giggled, and the room burst into laughter — myself included. Even the visible clock at the edge of the stage is gently ignored, as if time itself were secondary to the act of thinking aloud. The result is a performance that feels simultaneously controlled and improvised, where precision emerges from apparent looseness.
For someone who does not typically gravitate toward stand-up, the experience is unexpectedly enthralling. Novak’s performance resists easy categorization; it borrows from theatrical monologue, philosophical inquiry, and physical comedy without settling into any single form. She aims to generate laughter while sharing her thoughts and philosophy.
Following her final U.S. tour stops in Los Angeles on May 1 and 2, Novak will continue to the U.K. For those interested in her work and her approach, her acclaimed show “Get On Your Knees” is available to stream on Netflix.
