Fast Facts

• Born: 1983, New York.
• Education: Georgetown University.
• Best known for: Get On Your Knees (off-Broadway 2019–2020, ongoing tours, Netflix 2024); Poog podcast (2019–present, co-hosted with Kate Berlant); How to Weep in Public (Three Rivers Press, 2016).
• Frequent collaborator: Kate Berlant (Poog), John Early (adjacent theatrical-alt-comedy circle), Natasha Lyonne (Get On Your Knees director).

Early Career and the New York Circuit (2006–2016)

Novak came up through the post-2000s New York alt-circuit that substantially overlapped with UCB without being specifically UCB-originated. Her 2000s–2010s work included stand-up sets at Upright Citizens Brigade, the early micro-venue circuit that emerged through the 2010s, and extensive work in the New York alt-showcase scene.

Her early voice — dry, dense, precise, willing to extend a premise past the point where audiences would have forgiven a punchline — made her a reliable development-room performer across the 2010s. She was not, in the 2010s, a television or streaming presence. The work was specifically a New York stand-up voice operating in New York rooms.

How to Weep in Public (Three Rivers Press, 2016) is her memoir-in-essays from this period. The book is a useful primary-source document of her pre-Get On Your Knees voice: the prose is substantially the stand-up voice on the page, and the territory the book works — depression, the specific aesthetics of sadness, the genuine pleasures of staying in bed — is continuous with what the later theatrical work would develop at different scale.

Get On Your Knees (2019–Present)

The show began as workshopped material at Union Hall in Brooklyn across 2017 and 2018. The premise, stated plainly: Novak's essay about oral sex — specifically about the act of performing it, the social and aesthetic considerations involved, the cultural apparatus around it — extended into 90 minutes of sustained monologue.

The show's formal achievement is that the single-subject premise genuinely sustains 98 minutes of stand-up. Most one-subject comedy hours are actually themed collections with a unifying premise (see our how to write a Fringe hour guide for the distinction). Get On Your Knees is genuinely about its one subject for its full runtime. The material does not digress. The digressions are themselves about the subject at higher levels of abstraction. The commitment is total.

Natasha Lyonne directed the theatrical run. John Early and Mike Birbiglia produced. The show opened at Cherry Lane Theatre in July 2019 and ran multiple extensions through early 2020. A planned 2020 tour was paused by the pandemic; touring resumed in 2021 and has continued through 2026.

The Netflix release in 2024 was unusually late relative to the show's initial run — most theatrical comedy specials film within a year of the show reaching its final form. Novak's five-year gap between theatrical premiere and streaming release reflects her deliberate approach: the show was toured extensively, refined continuously across hundreds of performances, and filmed only when she and the production team were satisfied with where the material had arrived.

The Specific Craft

Three features of Get On Your Knees that working writer-performers study:

• The density of the prose. Novak's sentences are written, not improvised. Working stand-ups who attend Get On Your Knees frequently describe the show's prose as denser than anything in contemporary stand-up; it is closer to a Mary Karr sentence than to a Patton Oswalt bit. The density rewards both live attention and repeat listening in ways that most contemporary specials do not.
• The sustained commitment to a subject most stand-ups would treat as premise. "Oral sex" as a stand-up subject is not unusual. "Oral sex" as a subject the performer commits to for 98 minutes, developing increasingly abstract riffs without ever leaving the territory, is unusual. The specific craft is in the refusal to change the subject.
• The theatrical staging. The show's staging at Cherry Lane — Novak alone on a spare stage, with specific lighting changes, specific blocking, specific physical beats — treats the theatrical conventions seriously. The staging is not decoration; it is load-bearing. Material lands differently because of how the staging has positioned it. This is theatrical thinking applied to stand-up, and it is not an accident.

Poog (2019–Present)

Poog is the podcast Novak co-hosts with Kate Berlant. Launched September 2019, still running through 2026. The show's format: the two hosts discuss wellness products, aesthetic philosophy, the specific textures of contemporary self-care-industrial-complex culture, and whatever they have been thinking about that week.

The podcast is worth treating seriously because it functions as the long-form prose complement to Novak's stage work. Themes that appear in Get On Your Knees — the specific pleasures of refined sadness, the aesthetic consideration of bodily experience, the language we use to describe things we do not quite want to describe directly — are continuous across the stage show and the podcast. Audiences of both works notice that they are in dialogue with each other.

The Novak-Berlant creative partnership is also worth noting as a specific 2020s alt-comedy collaboration model. The two performers are not romantic partners, not writing partners in the conventional sitcom-room sense, but sustained creative interlocutors whose parallel careers inform each other. This kind of partnership has precedents (Silverman-Ansari, Fey-Carlock, Schur-Daniels) but is less common in contemporary alt comedy than the lone-voice model.

Other Work

• Recurring stand-up appearances across the working New York and LA alt circuits, including at Largo and Dynasty Typewriter.
• Recurring Comedy Bang! Bang! appearances (see our Earwolf page) across the 2019–2024 period.
• Essays and prose in The New Yorker, Vogue, and elsewhere, continuing the essayistic register of How to Weep in Public.
• Reported development of a follow-up theatrical solo project; no public date or subject as of April 2026.

Why Novak Matters

Three propositions for Novak's specific importance to the 2020s alt-comedy ecosystem.

First, the theatrical-solo-show argument. Get On Your Knees is, together with Nanette, one of the two most-important arguments of the 2017–2024 period that the theatrical-solo-show and the stand-up hour are a single form rather than two. The subsequent 2020s work that has followed this logic — John Early's Now More Than Ever, Alex Edelman's Just for Us, and Ziwe's continuing theatrical Black Friend project — is operating in a space Novak helped define.

Second, the writerly-density argument. Very few working contemporary alt comedians are writer-first in the specific way Novak is. The prose density that Get On Your Knees operates at is an option most stand-ups do not fully pursue. Novak's sustained demonstration that audiences will engage with writerly density, given the right subject and the right theatrical frame, is a specific contribution that most contemporary alt comedy cannot quite replicate and from which many other performers are learning.

Third, the multi-form-practice argument. The Novak-Berlant Poog partnership, the essays, the theatrical stage show, the stand-up touring — these are all different registers of the same underlying artistic concern. Very few contemporary alt comedians successfully distribute their voice across this many forms without either diluting the voice or under-serving any of them.

Where to Start

• Canonical entry: Get On Your Knees (Netflix, 2024). 98 minutes. Available in all Netflix regions.
• If you want the prose: How to Weep in Public (2016). Readable in a day.
• If you want the ongoing work: Poog podcast. Start with a recent episode; the show has been consistent since launch.
• If you can catch the live show: the Get On Your Knees tour is in active play and worth seeing specifically because the theatrical register is what the show is designed for. The Netflix release is substantial but the room-version is the canonical experience.