The Half Hour

Jacqueline Novak approaches physical existence like a brain trapped inside an inconvenient, embarrassing meat suit. She accepts the fashion magazine verdict that her shape is an “apple woman” not to solicit sympathy, but to interrogate the humiliation of having a torso equated with grocery produce.

Taped at The Civic Theatre in New Orleans for the fifth season of Comedy Central’s The Half Hour, the performance caught Novak during a productive creative stretch. Earlier in 2016, Crown published her memoir, How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings on Depression from One Who Knows, and this set showed the same frantic, literary rhythm that she would later expand into full-length solo theater.

Across the set, she explains why she abandoned writing poetry (calling it “the art of being a bit much”), ponders whether eating feels better than breathing, and questions the least sexual words in the language. The jokes arrive packed inside dense streams of parentheticals, driven by speed, neurotic certainty, and an obsession with awkward physical mechanics.