‘A Fully-Formed Comedy Writer at 18’: How B.J. Novak ’01 Found His Voice at Harvard

B.J. Novak ’01 arrived at Harvard with the comedic competence of a seasoned professional.

“He was on this completely different level,” said W. David Marx ’01, one of Novak’s college roommates. “I was struggling to figure out how to write comedy, and he was a fully-formed, great comedy writer at like 18.”

A Newton, Massachusetts native, Novak had landed in the local news in high school after he and his friends swapped the audio guides at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts for their own prank version.

“He showed up already so good at comedy, had achieved pranks that got attention, and then the next four years were really playing that out at Harvard,” Marx said.

Novak came in knowing he wanted to join the Harvard Lampoon, the semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine. He called it “amazing to be part of an organization that took comedy so incredibly seriously” in a statement to The Crimson.

But much of his energy on campus went elsewhere, into pranks, disruptions, and his own independent projects.

“The things I did independently are where I really figured out my voice,” Novak wrote.

“The thing about B.J. is he didn’t need the Lampoon to do any of these things,” said Marx, also a former Lampoon member. “We all just did things. We weren’t waiting around for anybody to tell us.”

Josh Lambert ’01, one of Novak’s blockmates, was first struck by his affinity for film. As a freshman and sophomore, Novak made short films with Marx, complete with scripts and full equipment.

No one really watched them, Novak recalled. So he poured the next two years into a more ambitious project, the B.J. Show, with B.J. Averell ’02.

Funded by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, the show started as a planned prank.

“Then I started thinking, what if it was just actually good?” Novak recalled. “An actual, tongue-in-cheek, old-fashioned variety show.”

Averell said Novak brought the Lampoon’s more serious approach to comedy into the production.

“At one point I thought we should say something about how Sanders Theater was named after famous Harvard graduate Colonel Sanders,” Averell said, “and B.J. was like, ‘You cannot do that. That would lower the comedic caliber of the entire evening.’”

The first B.J. Show, in May 2000, sold out Lowell Lecture Hall two nights running, with a reverse stripper, a dunk contest against the men’s basketball team, and a set from the improv troupe On Thin Ice.

“I remember being absolutely taken aback by the variety show B.J. put together,” wrote Christopher Kirchhoff ’01. “My Winthrop housemate, who was quite unassuming, came out of the closet as a world-class entertainer to the entire campus, all at once.”

Offstage, friends described a quieter, even “mysterious” Novak, disarming in conversation.

“I think the right word is observant,” said William Decherd ’01, a former blockmate. “He takes in so much information about his surroundings, and then stitches that information into incredibly innovative jokes and storylines.”

Dan Mintz ’02, a fellow Lampoon member and one of Novak’s future collaborators, said his humor stood out for being smart.

“He has a bit of a more literary quality to it without also losing hard-hitting jokes,” Mintz said, pointing to Novak’s 2014 short story collection as an extension of his college voice.

At Harvard, Novak concentrated in literature, which he said “sounded much fancier” than English.

“I was most interested in being a writer, so it was either English or Literature to me,” he wrote. “Literature sounded more interesting because it included a foreign language and a lot of theory.”

Friends saw his senior thesis, “‘To Be or Not to Be:’ Hollywood’s Answers to Hamlet’s Question,” as one more piece of the mystery.

“B.J. was doing the B.J. Show, and all these other projects, and was in the Hasty Pudding, and I wouldn’t have guessed that, okay, he’s just so into the thesis,” Marx said. “And yet he nailed it.”

For the second B.J. Show, staged in a packed Sanders Theater his senior year, Novak aimed higher. He set out to land the comedian and “Full House” star Bob Saget.

“I cold-called his representation, told them I was calling from Harvard, and we wanted to invite him to perform in this show,” Novak wrote.

In May 2001, the B.J. Show returned with Saget as its special guest.

“It was remarkably big time, considering it was just these two guys putting this on,” said Brian Norton ’01, another of Novak’s roommates. “It was a sign of things to come for him.”

After delivering the Ivy Oration at 2001 Class Day, Novak moved to Los Angeles, where an impressed Saget had offered him a writing job on his new sitcom, “Raising Dad.” Novak started doing stand-up and soon landed his first television job, on the MTV prank show “Punk’d.”

“I thought, this is as good a job as I’m ever going to get,” Novak wrote. “All my friends thought I had found my calling.”

A few years later, he became the first hire on “The Office,” the hit sitcom that introduced him to millions.

Mintz said Novak has hardly changed since college.

“He has a very super positive, sometimes almost manic energy,” Mintz said. “People lose that over time out here. You learn so many things about what doesn’t work that they kind of forget to be excited about just things being funny, and I think he didn’t really lose that.”

—Staff writer Stephanie Dragoi can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at sd3.28.