Introducing US comedian Jacqueline Novak who makes her debut at the Edinburgh Festival this year at the Pleasance Courtyard with her show ‘How Embarrassing For Her’.
On her Tonight Show debut this year, Jacqueline made an impassioned case against French fry theft. On James Corden last year, the topic was pizza quantity. While these family friendly sets were “radical in their own right!” Novak insists, they came to be out of necessity after the networks said no to Jacqueline’s *other* material, including but not limited to her lofty meditations on genitals which Novak describes as “not dick jokes…but penile notions.” This is why Jacqueline is so excited to come to Edinburgh where with her new show, ‘How Embarrassing For Her’, she can unleash an hour of her completely unfiltered notions: darker, weirder, more poignant and personal…delivered with breathless exuberance.
Jacqueline finds everything embarrassing…except for the obvious. Revealing intimate details of her life to strangers? Her chosen profession. Crying in public? She wrote a book encouraging it. Being caught for even a moment having something resembling self-esteem? Unbearable. As a woman, shame is constantly dumped upon you…in regards to body, beauty, sexual behaviour and more. As a human, the indignities are near constant. How Embarrassing for Her weaves Novak’s personal stories with completely original stand up to parse what does and does not deserve our embarrassment.
Audiences can expect Novak to absolve them of their shame across a variety of arenas from low brow to high, from being a long-winded bore to giving a toothy blowjob to accidentally sending someone two almost identical drafts of the same love-letter-email. Yet, just as Jacqueline puts you at ease, freeing you from unnecessary shame, she provides an entire new collection of human behaviours and predicaments to obsess about.
Embarrassments cross all realms of topics of interest to Novak including: the human body – no, not extra fat or blemishes, but the sheer fact that from the neck down we are a deaf, dumb and blind sensate blobs. Life moments, such as the first time someone first tells a child “it’s not cute anymore.” The discomfort in acknowledging that one’s parents are sexual beings. Even inanimate objects are not safe from scrutiny. Consider pizza and how he, yes he, in a pitiful act of desperation to be eaten, cuts itself into a triangle to ease its way into you mouth, tip first. Novak likes to cringe in horror at imaginary predicaments…embarrassments that could unfold on the astral plane as a ghost or in an apocalyptic future in the presence of aliens.
