Let me be clear: Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees the 94-minute performance film burning up Netflix, the one women won’t shut up about is not a comedy routine about blow jobs. I mean, yes, it’s a lot about that sex act from her perspective and she’s devastatingly smart on the topic and you will laugh so hard that sometimes you’ll have to rewind because you missed stuff while making this face, like “Yahhhhhhhhunh?”
But Novak is executing a bait and switch here, luring you with sex and then blowing your mind. She likes men; she enjoys having sex with them. But her stealth subject, her true subject is this: How much cis/het women protect men’s feelings/egos including in the language we use around sex and how little that effort is reciprocated.
Some background before we get to some examples: Novak was at Georgetown University in a comedy troupe alongside John Mulaney, Nick Kroll and Mike Birbiglia. Now 41, she has been doing stand-up for nearly two decades (often partnered with John Early), appeared on what feels like every late-night show there is, wrote for “Broad City” and published a memoir in 2016 called “How to Weep in Public. Feeble Offerings on Depression from One Who Knows.” With Kate Berlant, she co-hosts a popular comedy-wellness podcast called “Poog” (that’s Goop spelled backward). In other words: She put in her 10,000 hours.
But after all that success, Novak realized that certain ideas couldn’t be contained within 10-minute stand-up sets. She wanted to concentrate all her creative energy into one single opus which became “Get on Your Knees.” The first version of it was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2018; then she spent six years workshopping the hell out of it: taking it to every festival and venue that mattered, building credibility and insider buzz with the two hardest groups to win over: industry people and other comedians.
And workshop is the right word here, because this show is a trumpet blast of language as poetic as it is funny (Natasha Lyonne directed the Netflix special, at Town Hall in Manhattan). Novak never stops moving across the stage, using only her body and her mic as props. You will immediately think of Robin Williams when it comes to energy and brainy asides. But and I say this out of love for Williams let me point out that when he performed a similar show, he doused himself with 12 water bottles to demonstrate how hard he was working up there; Novak takes a couple sips from a glass tucked against the stage wall.
As for the, uh, stuff of her routine, I know that joking about sex has been around as long as jokes and sex have. Our rhetoric around male genitalia is often noted to be inflated. But what sets Novak apart is her hero’s journey through language “The word ‘penis’ has a problem with its tender emotionality.” It sounds like “a soft heartbeat.” “The true syllable of devastation is the ‘nis.’”
She admits to having “coddled the little ego of the penis, telling it what I think it wants to hear.” She calls out the ridiculousness of macho penis imagery: “rock hard,” a “choking hazard” (even though “a child’s gumball is more of a threat”). Any rude or unfair stereotype of a woman, she suggests, is actually an accurate description of the penis: They’re too sensitive; they’re always reacting to things; they’re needy; they nag you; they’re drama queens. “The life of the party one minute; the next flopped over and sulking, waiting for someone to notice that, frankly, she’s upset.”
But listen closely for what Novak says between jokes: How she sets up laugh tracks under any man’s speech in case anything he says turns out to be funny. How she casts her “most generous gaze” upon men while still having sex with them and also while talking about them onstage but mostly while laughing at them but also sometimes crying over them and occasionally yelling about them in therapy. (“Poeticizing their flaws in real time,” she adds.) How many times a day does she do this? A thousand! More than that! All day long we are making sure it’s safe for the man to toddle on through like a drunken king!
You know that ripple effect when someone says something so true that it also feels new and you’re like, “Whoa, I knew that this whole time but I didn’t know that I knew it until she said it?” That’s how I felt when Novak gets to what can only be called her climax. She’s done that kind of ego-boosting, she says. That kind of emotional safeguarding including the laudatory language around sex for “every guy. Every guy I’ve liked or dated, every guy I’ve worked for or who worked for me. All of ’em. And I love to do it, and I do it without breaking a sweat.” But they don’t do the same for her.
That observation connects Novak to so many things happening right now that have no literal connection but feel connected anyway. The MAGA diss that Taylor Swift is dating Travis Kelce for his money. The anger over Greta Gerwig not getting an Oscar nomination for best director even though Barbie is the first movie directed by a woman alone to gross more than $1 billion worldwide.
I’d even connect it with those recent studies gathered in a Jan. 26 Financial Times article suggesting that women all over the world (the U.S., U.K., Germany, China, South Korea and several African countries) have become significantly more liberal since #MeToo broke in 2017 while men have become more conservative not economically conservative but culturally conservative; particularly around questions of women and work including what wives should do in the home and whether they should anticipate lifelong careers and get this: Everyone discussing these studies is focused on why men are becoming more conservative instead of asking why women are becoming more liberal?
Novak, or anything that he is doing, doesn’t concern being anti-men or over men. Nor are they concerned about the negative aspects of male behavior. Novak does not even tackle abuse, desertion or anger in any sense. She’s simply saying that there’s a disparity a very common one too with humor and (yes) sentimentality; it’s one we should pay heed to carefully.
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