Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees

This 2024 special, directed by Natasha Lyonne, records Jacqueline Novak's long-running one-woman show. Novak talks around a single subject from start to finish, and does so with philosophical language, literary reference and meticulous sentence construction. The method is to make taking an ordinarily dismissed subject seriously the joke itself. Novak does not use joke structures; she builds long paragraphs, corrects her own phrasing, and the humour comes out of that precision. Lyonne's direction is plain; there is little camera movement and nothing outside the stage. The text runs unbroken for an hour and a half without changing pace, which is both the show's strength and its limit. Who it's for: those who like text-driven, literary stand-up. Who it's not for: viewers uncomfortable with explicit sexual content; the show is about that from beginning to end.