The New Yorker:
“Get on Your Knees,” her Netflix special, is a reflection on the blow job.
By Carrie Battan
The comic Jacqueline Novak wears the same outfit each time she performs her solo show, “Get on Your Knees”: a loose gray T-shirt, jeans, and a broken-in pair of white-and-gray sneakers. The clothes allow her a kind of anonymity and neutrality, as well as comfort. “Get on Your Knees” is part standup act, part coming-of-age story, and part philosophy lecture. It is also an athletic feat, so she often wears a sports bra, a practical choice that nonetheless warranted extensive consideration before a performance one evening in the summer of 2021. Novak had dedicated the previous four years to the show, but she was still tinkering, refining, and annotating each creative decision she made, particularly as she anticipated taping the show for a Netflix special. “I love sports bras,” she said in front of a mirror in the greenroom at the Cherry Lane Theatre, in the West Village, where she was doing a ten-week run. “But there’s this belief, inherently, that I’m not supposed to be wearing a sports bra. Do you know what I mean? It’s too athletic.”
Novak, who is prone to self-narration, doubled back: “But then I’m, like, why do I feel the audience is owed a separation of my breasts?” Novak is forty-one, but she has a girlish face and a long-standing interest in elaborate skin-care rituals that, to an audience member, might make her look like the high-school version of herself she explores in the performance.
“Get on Your Knees” is a ninety-minute show about fellatio, a description that might make people assume that Novak is yet another raunch comic. In fact, much of the performance is about how insufficient the language around sex can be. “I think the word ‘erection’ is a bit architectural for what’s happening there,” she says at one point. “I don’t think anyone should go in that building. It’s not up to code.”
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