Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Jacqueline Novak: Get On Your Knees’ On Netflix, A Funny Feminist Manifesto Flips Man-Pleasing On Its Head

Directed for the stage by John Early and for Netflix by Natasha Lyonne, Jacqueline Novak delivers a bold debut for the streaming giant with an hour-and-a-half of comedy that you might think is just about blowjobs, but there’s a lot more at work here.

JACQUELINE NOVAK: GET ON YOUR KNEES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Jacqueline Novak performed in the same improv troupe as Nick Kroll and John Mulaney when they all attended Georgetown University, but Novak didn’t truly break through as a stand-up herself until 2016, when she published her memoir, How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings on Depression from One Who Knows, and performed her first half-hour special for Comedy Central.

She leveled up and then some with this show, which she first brought to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018, then to multiple engagements off-Broadway in NYC in 2019 and touring into 2020. She had to wait out the pandemic to film it for posterity. Netflix describes her show as “a funny and philosophical meditation on sex, coming-of-age and a certain body part.” But don’t let this clip mislead you. Her special is not about a body part that rhymes with Mulva.

What Comedy Specials Will It Remind You Of?: There are plenty of men in comedy, too many perhaps, who devote much of their time to dick jokes. But what if you made a whole special on the subject, and flipped the perspective? Now we’re talking. Or rather, Novak is.

Memorable Jokes: Despite all of the promotional emphasis on blowjobs, Novak doesn’t really focus all of her attention on the subject until 23 minutes into her act. For comedic foreplay, she jokes about wanting to become a particular kind of ghost should the afterlife present the option.

She hones in on the linguistic contrast between the words “penis” and “cock,” which as she relates them, makes a lot more sense syllabically and metaphorically.

If you enjoy metaphors, then you are swimming in luck. There’s her questioning of the vulva as the most appropriate comparison to a blooming flower, as demonstrated in the above clip, and and an even more damning funny-because-it’s-true observation that when men traffic in negative stereotypes to “describe women unfairly, you’re probably describing the penis perfectly.”

Our Take: Novak’s performance works not just as an oral argument re-evaluating our attitudes toward oral sex, but also on multiple meta levels, literally in finding poetic justice for women in gender/sexual dynamics as well as women within the spaces of stand-up comedy.

She’s upfront about her presentation choices from the get-go, stopping to physically trace her steps back to the wings of the stage and then again to the microphone, comparing it to the moments during sex when a person moves down from the face past the torso to the pelvis, placing even more attention on the phallic nature of the microphone in comedy. How so? “Cause the whole way there, everyone knows what you’re headed to do, but you’re not yet doing the thing!” And all the while, the intended audience feels excitement, tension, anticipation.

And then there’s her stage presence. The way she handles the mic cord as she strides back and forth along the stage, almost like an early Chris Rock (although she brings no pain). Her delivery, too, carries a breathless pacing. And she’s dressed in a simple gray T-shirt and jeans, so as not to distract her audience. “I like to keep it moving onstage, cause I know, I know how you people operate,” she boasts. “I stand still for too long, you see something you like, you take a mental snapshot. Who knows what you’ll do with it later?”

About an hour later, Novak re-references her opening choices, drawing out a stark contrast from stand-ups who take the stage all hyped up, playing to their crowd, suggesting that strong start might fade and decay over the course of an hour. “I prefer to build from nothing,” she jokes.

Novak might say she’s keeping it soft or blurry, but her performance could not be bolder or clearer.

Get On Your Knees takes an act conventionally seen by a patriarchal society as submissive and flips it on its head. The young boys to men in Novak’s life don’t deserve to get name-dropped or even specific personality traits, because this isn’t about them, and certainly not about their condescending fathers. Rather, this show is a richly feminist manifesto of sorts, restoring Novak’s own dignity so generations of young women do not have to learn about sex from flippant listicles in women’s magazines or books by Nabokov or even the friend of your friend’s older sister.

In Novak’s reframing of her own sexual awakening, we as a collective audience wake up to her comedic talents. She may have bloomed years later than her college comedy partners (kudos to another older Georgetown alum, Mike Birbiglia, for helping Novak stage her initial off-Broadway run), but now is her time to blossom.

Our Call: STREAM IT. This is the Sex Ed Talk generations of women wish they could’ve received, even better than what Novak jokingly refers to as “diagonal learning” from an older female acquaintance. This is over the top, on the up and up, and oh so funny.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat. He also podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.