jacqueline novak get on your knees tour

JACQUELINE NOVAK

Get on your knees.

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Review: In ‘Get on Your Knees,’ a Comedian Goes There

Jacqueline Novak’s show, a stand-up comedy set that inclines toward theater, offers a personal and intellectual history of oral sex.

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By Alexis Soloski

Take away the hormones, the pheromones, the heat and the dark and the drink (or three). Turn off the flesh and turn on the analytics: Oral sex, at least in the abstract, seems like a pretty weird thing for a couple of bodies to do.

Most of us don’t spend a ton of time contemplating the practice theoretically, divorced from desire, but Jacqueline Novak devotes nearly an hour and a half to it. In “ Get on Your Knees,” at the Cherry Lane Theater, a stand-up set that inclines toward theater, Ms. Novak provides a personal and intellectual history of fellatio. Shrewd, explicit, though not exactly raunchy, this is the funniest show about Cartesian dualism you will see all year.

The evening’s early moments, at least after Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” stops playing, have to do with short-circuiting expectations. Ms. Novak bounds onstage in a passion-killer ensemble: gray T-shirt, gray jeans, gray sneakers. Then she walks back the bounding. “I hate a confident entrance,” she says. “I find it crass.” A born overthinker, Ms. Novak rarely seems to have met a word or an action she didn’t want to probe. (That’s the intellectual kind of probe, thank you very much.)

In place of off-color riffs and lewd visual aids, Novak deconstructs the semantics of heterosexual sex. She explains why a penis is not like a snake, why penetration is a misnomer, why we might want to rethink a word like erection. It is, she says, “a bit architectural for what’s going on there. No one’s going in that building. It’s not up to code.” She has thoughts on female genitalia and its metaphors, too: “If someone gave me a bouquet of roses, and one of them looked like my vulva, I’d say I think someone stepped on one of the roses.” Bachelorettes in search of a good time and fewer T.S. Eliot quotations may want to look elsewhere.

Even as Ms. Novak segues into reminiscence, she prefers to cast herself as an observer. Recalling the first time she performed oral sex, she says she found herself wishing she had a second mouth to narrate the attempt: “We are aware of the situation. We are working on the problem, sir! We appreciate your patience.” Her director, the fellow comedian John Early, should probably have told her that the show doesn’t need two climaxes. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) But that’s how she likes it. (Ditto.)

Ms. Novak is a big fan of her own mind. She has a poetic sensibility, she tells us; she is a born orator and, if anything, too articulate. I’d bet that her actual inner monologue is a lot more self-critical, but arrogance is a good look for her. Her body or, as she likes to call it, “a sack of sex potatoes” seems more like an inconvenience. She paces the stage obsessively, tracing the length of the microphone cord as though walking a mandala and clutching the mike close to her chest. Still, she’s clever enough in using a hand, an elbow or her chin when she needs to give a joke a visual boost.

The penis is her ostensible subject, yet there are other stories here: a coming-of-age one, and another about what it means to be the not-so-proud owner of both a sack of sex potatoes built, at least in part, to give pleasure to men, and a brain that finds a lot of the business of sex farcical.

I’m not sure how good a case Ms. Novak makes for fellatio — as text, as pastime. (These days, if I’m on my knees, I’m usually brandishing a wet wipe before a toddler, so it’s possible I’m a hard sell.) But she is brilliant on the absurdity of having and being a thinking, feeling, desiring body, especially a female one, in a world that might not want that.

To be a woman “is to be the great American novel baked inside a cheesy crust pizza,” she says. “Whether someone’s hungry or they’re looking to read, either way they’re annoyed.”

Jacqueline Novak: Get On Your Knees Through Aug. 18 at the Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, cherrylanetheatre.org . Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.

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Jacqueline Novak Is Ready to Stand Up

By Savannah Walsh

“In this life, it is almost never too late to turn back,” comedian Jacqueline Novak argues in the final act of Get on Your Knees , her 90-minute meditation on the blow job, now streaming on Netflix. She compares her early attempts at oral sex to turning around on a diving board at the very last minute, contorting herself into something that’s “infinitely more complex than the original dive.”

But as Novak speaks to Vanity Fair over Zoom, she is well aware that there’s no reneging on the release of her first special after five years of performing this same material live across the country. In fact, it was the “everywhere-ness of Netflix” that made the 41-year-old comedian trust the platform to introduce her to the world. “It felt like it would give the most people the opportunity to discover my work,” she says. “Let’s go as wide as possible and see what sticks.”

The very funny, very philosophical special, filmed before a live audience at Manhattan’s Town Hall and directed by Novak’s close friend Natasha Lyonne, goes deep on Novak’s fraught feelings about fellatio, morphing into a portrait of herself as “a tragic figure of blow job excellence” before finally becoming a reclamation of her sexual origins.

In the special, she freely admits to possessing a “poetic sensibility…that can be trying at times.” But Novak’s disclaimer doesn’t quite prepare a viewer for what comes next, whether it’s her qualms about the classification of a penis—she argues that they’re more stereotypically feminine than masculine: “Oh, they’re so sensitive, they’re overly reacting to things, they’re needy, they’re naggy, they poke you in the night”—or her explanation for why she protects the identities of her former flames. They’re simply “containers for my self-discovery,” Novak explains. “They got the blow jobs. I think that’s enough.”

Says the comic now, “It’s just a dynamic that I get fired up about—the show is so much of me getting to say what I didn’t say, couldn’t say, sort of getting to play that out. Wouldn’t it have been fun if I said this?”

Novak’s oral fixation dates back decades. “I wanted to write my college essay about it, but I knew they couldn’t handle it—not like you people,” she tells the audience. The show itself was first performed in 2018 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, five years after the event debuted Phoebe Waller-Bridge ’s Fleabag . Back then, Novak called it How Embarrassing for Her.

Half a decade later, Novak, who also hosts the popular podcast Poog with Kate Berlant, spoke with Vanity Fair about finally giving up Get on Your Knees, reappraising shame, and deciding what’s next: “I’m not going to fake another argument for my soul where I’m not feeling it.”

Vanity Fair: By bringing the special to Netflix, you’re relinquishing some control. People will now be able to experience the show any way they choose–pausing to make a snack, starting smack-dab in the middle. How do you surrender to that?

Jacqueline Novak: There’s something comforting, a little bit, about imagining it paused on me making some stupid expression. To me, the greatest feeling is, I don’t know, going to get food in the kitchen while something’s paused that you’re happy to be watching. It’s just waiting. I always like to let it play while I go get the thing, so I kind of half-hear it and then I rewind. It’s bizarre. I don’t know why I do it that way.

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This thing that has been artistic angst for me, it’s kind of comforting to imagine it diminished to the casualness of television. It just takes some of the intensity away. That energy has to be put not into trying to oversee the reception of the work—that instinct instantly has to refocus itself on other creative work. I want to live in that place where I’m just focusing on the work. And one thing after the next is the dream. More projects, less emphasis on each individual one to be “the everything,” right?

In the special, there are times where you zoom out to say, “I know the temptation is to paint me this way, but actually this is how I felt about it.” So how do you feel about Netflix inevitably grouping the special in with other stand-up specials when it could also be regarded as theater?

In this case, it’s actually my absolute dream. It was always supposed to be a stand-up comedy special to me. That kind of took a detour into being mounted as a theater project. Then it was more traditional stand-up, just touring it on the road. As someone who didn’t have a fan base that I could tour to, trying to generate excitement or sales around the show, that was the best way to do the show a bunch of times. That’s why even when we were doing it in theaters, there was a microphone stand. There’s no sets. I’m trying to remind everyone that it’s stand-up all the time.

Given that you’ve been performing a version of this show for five years now, I was impressed by how it doesn’t feel overworked or refined. How do you keep it fresh?

It’s built into the fact that I always feel inherently unsatisfied with my own words, so I never feel like I’m just reciting. It always feels like these are the latest best words I have, and I’m still unsatisfied, but hopefully the spirit is coming through. That’s just always there for me. And then also I was trying not to polish it to a point of where it’s unrecognizable.

My final speech, that’s very word-by-word precise, and it’s important that the rest of it feel a bit more...Yeah, I didn’t want to go like, “Okay, now it’s time to film the special and I have to turn everything into stone.” Because I always felt unsatisfied and frustrated trying to express myself while performing the show, I should also feel that way during the special. Maybe this time they won’t know what I mean.

And it feels like you’re coming to the conclusion—about blow jobs and yourself—anew each time.

I think that’s because I am. I’m reinvestigating the things I’m saying every time, and so it’s real. I know I’ve said them before, but there’s still a question mark.

I saw the show at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in fall 2019. When I think back to the version of myself that experienced it, she feels so far away from who I am now. What is the biggest way you, and in turn the show, have changed since you started doing it?

Well, I think there was more and more confidence and pleasure as it went, just because that anxiety, fear, questioning, everything—all that kind of stuff is just baked into the show and myself. It’s there either way, and so there’s a lot more pleasure in my later performances. It just grew. It had to retain the truth of all the stuff about anxiety, and it did. That’s all there, but the basic level of performing and communicating these ideas and having some faith that they were going to work—that’s really probably it.

How did pausing the show and going into lockdown transform the special?

It was right before the tour. I did one tour date, and I had this pride to be one of the comedians canceling tour dates, because to me, that meant I’m really doing it. I wasn’t even mourning the fact so much that the dates weren’t going to happen.

It was this period of rest and reflection and all that, and I wasn’t really sure. I knew I’d want to get going with it again, [that I] had a sort of running start to filming it. I didn’t want to feel like I was filming it cold, and then it ended up being like, well, I’ll remount it. I’ll put it up at Cherry Lane [Theatre] again to work on it and then do some touring. And it was so fun doing it for new audiences. If I could have just put it on Netflix, then maybe a bunch of people in Minnesota would see it, and then I would get to go to Minnesota and do comedy. But it was sort of fun for me to go to Minnesota—they don’t know anything about me other than maybe they’ve heard this show was good—and I get to win them over. I wanted to win people over, 200 people at a time.

One of my favorite lines in the show is about communicating self-awareness. You say: “I don’t mind actually being a fool in this life, as long as I can let you know that I too hear the jangle of the bells upon my hat.”. What’s your relationship like with shame? I’m even thinking of how the show changed names from How Embarrassing for Her to Get on Your Knees .

That title I chose before I knew exactly what material I was going to do in the show. I was like, I know my own themes, and that’ll work for whether I end up doing this one narrative or the next. And then once the show developed more, it was like, well, I’m not going to call it How Embarrassing For Her . It’s from someone else’s perspective in this way that I didn’t want it to be the headline. I knew I wanted it to be a really strong phrase.

But shame. That self-awareness thing, or that fear of not being self-aware or whatever—I think one version of that would be in a situation where you might feel embarrassed. You would almost go further and choose to feel shame to doubly protect yourself. So it’s like this safety mechanism to try to be more self-aware when you should be a little embarrassed. Shame is just so painful that to try to give someone else even a tiny window out of it is something I value.

I once read an interview where you said intention is the most important thing in a blow job. Was there ever a time that your intention for the show got lost?

No. My sense of the underlying essence of why I feel compelled to do that show, that was pretty locked in for me. This desire to wrestle with this contradiction and say these two things can live side by side, that was always there. The only times things felt off is if the audience was coming in with too much of a precious, respectful eye on me doing the show. Because then suddenly, they’re taking that too seriously. That’s why I like it being framed clearly in standup comedy.

Given that this is an introduction of you for many people, how do you approach a follow-up? Do you feel the urge to go completely in the other direction, or to do something in a similar vein that’s subversive in a different way?

There have been times when I’m doing a show where I’m like, it’ll be so fun if my next show was just one-liners that were completely discreet from each other and could go in any order, and I wasn’t feeling like I was arguing for my soul every night. I’m not going to fake another argument for my soul where I’m not feeling it. That would never happen. If it does have this similar style, it would be because, apparently, that’s my style. I definitely don’t have any rules for myself. It’s to be discovered in the development of it, so it could really go any way.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees

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Jacqueline Novak's 'Get On Your Knees' will blow you away

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Jacqueline Novak in her new comedy special, Get on Your Knees . Emily V. Aragones/Netflix hide caption

Jacqueline Novak in her new comedy special, Get on Your Knees .

In her smart and funny comedy special Get On Your Knees , performer Jacqueline Novak delivers a kind of Ted Talk on the subject of oral sex. It's also a passionate and thoughtful coming-of-age tale delivered in language that's been finely honed to accomplish its very funny purpose. Directed by Natasha Lyonne, the Netflix special began as an off-Broadway show.

Jacqueline Novak’s Netflix special is a manifesto on sex and power

Her acclaimed show, ‘Get on Your Knees,’ thoughtfully and hilariously interrogates gender dynamics

NEW YORK — Jacqueline Novak is wary of the opening paragraphs of profile stories. There’s always that whiff of manufactured serendipity. The old, Oh, come on in — just took these steaks off the grill . “Like, ‘I arrive at their apartment and they’re in the middle of painting,’” Novak says faux-airily. But today, a cold and humid Sunday afternoon in December, while she adjusts to the idea of being a profile subject, the L.A.-based comedian has invited me along for a convincingly normal and human set of downtown-Manhattan errands while we talk: a latte stop, a short walk around the block to get a glimpse of sunlight for the day and a browse through an upscale clothing boutique without buying anything.

By the time we settle in at a table in the lobby of the Ludlow Hotel, Novak, 41, has reconciled with the fact that an impression will be gotten, whether it’s the one she was hoping for or not. She has reached the point, she says, of “being like: ‘F--- it, dawg. Be observed.’”

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It is not long before she remarks offhandedly that this particular Lower East Side lobby — cozy and lamplit with a fireplace and sultry tufted couches — is a perfect place to pretend to be a ghost.

It is obvious even in just a few moments how much Novak thinks about the chasm between intent and interpretation, and about “the embarrassment of the flesh,” as she puts it. Both of which she explores in her Netflix comedy special, “Get on Your Knees,” which will debut Tuesday. Its sensational 2019 stage run at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre and, later, the Lucille Lortel was extended multiple times; it was named a New York Times Critic’s Pick. Oh, and: It’s a 90-minute show about blow jobs.

Or that’s the simple, arguably reductive way to think about it. The stand-up set is also an examination of our collective assumptions about what’s happening in the mind and spirit when the body assumes the titular pose, and a rebuttal to the traditional idea that a woman degrades in value with each sexual experience (or, as Novak calls it, “the scratch-and-sniff model of personhood”). It’s a blisteringly intellectual, deeply funny sermon examining the absurdity of our longest-held notions about the power dynamics of sex — one that had a longer journey from stage to screen than anyone involved expected.

To witness the show itself — which first gained momentum at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe under the early title “How Embarrassing for Her” — is to sit directly before a fire hose of frank postulation about sex that’s as scholarly as it is X-rated, nimbly invoking the works of the Greek mythologists, of Philip Roth, of Sharon Olds and Tony Robbins and Nietzsche. She narrates an early episode of teenage experimentation in an unfinished basement as Nabokov would. The advice commonly given to young women to “take it slow” in a dating situation where there’s hope for a real relationship? Novak condemns it with a flourish: “No. No! The hubris astonishes. Death is coming.”

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Novak chose her onstage uniform of a gray T-shirt and skinny jeans because it’s “the most neutral, kind of nothing outfit,” making virtually zero statements that might add to or detract or distract from the show. It’s an effective tactic, its modesty underlining the fact that it’s not Novak’s free-spirited sexuality that shocks so much as her self-possession.

“I wasn’t worried about saving myself for marriage,” she declares. “If I was going to present something to my eventual true love, I’d want it to be a collection of sexual skills and an attitude of confidence.”

Novak’s other works approach the world with the same quizzical stance toward traditional mores. Her 2016 depression memoir/self-help guide, “ How to Weep in Public ,” aims not to cure or motivate or in any way heal the depressed person reading it, but to keep them company with a set of compassionate, funny anecdotes from her own experiences at her lowest lows. Novak also co-hosts the podcast “ Poog ” alongside fellow comedian Kate Berlant; it’s an exploration of the modern wellness industry that tests its vast range of serums and services, not for the nobler purpose of separating the scammy from the effective but for the pure love of trying products. In an early episode, Novak delivered what acts as something of a thesis statement for the project: “People talk about snake-oil salesmen. I’m looking for a snake-oil salesman. Where are they? I’m looking to buy.”

It’s the “Poog” live tour that has brought Novak to New York on this dreary pre-Christmas weekend. At our table in the moody Ludlow lobby, Novak tells me that she always envisioned “Get on Your Knees” as a streaming special.

“It wasn’t like, ‘I want to have a New York stage show.’ It was like, ‘I want to make this comedy special,’ and in order to do that, there’s a lot of paths. I was open to anything,” Novak says. “If there was a bar that would have let me do it and I could get the people in, I would have done that. I was like, ‘I’ll do anything to get this show to a point where I believe in it enough that I would go banging doors down, saying, “Watch this. Put it on your streaming service.”’”

Instead, “Get on Your Knees” was brought to the stage and screen by a trio of well-known, well-loved funny people who also happen to be Novak’s friends. Natasha Lyonne produced the stage show and directed the Netflix special. Comedian and “Search Party” star John Early, who met Novak through his frequent collaborator Berlant, directed the show for the stage. Comedy multi-hyphenate Mike Birbiglia, who performed in the same Georgetown University improv troupe as Novak, Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, served as executive producer for the stage show.

Of course, all three swear they were just there for moral support. Lyonne came on board after seeing an early iteration of the show in Los Angeles, and she says very little about the show required coaching or tweaking even then. “I was just blown away, immediately, by her poetry and comedy, and how literary she was but also how obscenely hilarious she was,” Lyonne remembers. “I was obsessed.”

Early, too, says he mostly worked with Novak on bolstering what she’d already created. “My contribution was just kind of helping her plant her feet, talk to us directly and not be embarrassed by just … the ritual of theater,” Early says with a laugh. He also preserved the show’s pure stand-up comedy feel, he tells me, protecting it from the corny, self-serious theatrical conventions that a capital-T theater director might have inflicted on it.

Still, “I want to be very clear: This is really all a work of Jacqueline’s genius,” Early says. “I was just kind of cheerleading throughout.”

Birbiglia financed the show’s New York run with his wife after its original funding fell through. “I was an extra set of eyes and ears since I had done a bunch of solo shows before,” Birbiglia wrote in an email. “But the thing about Jacqueline is that her comedy voice is so singular, and when someone’s voice is like that, you’re really just trying to encourage them to be them .

“She operates on a deeply funny and specific frequency,” Birbiglia adds. “And so when she put on ‘Get on Your Knees’ downtown, it became the ‘it’ show of New York City because it was like her and thousands and thousands of people on this frequency at the same time.”

Indeed, “Get on Your Knees” seems to have struck a cathartic chord with audiences. The show’s most autobiographical sections expose a phenomenon familiar to many young women: that there’s hardly any daylight at all between the shame of having insufficient sexual knowledge and the shame of clearly having some. In one wild moment, Novak reenacts her own first attempt at oral sex while bemoaning the fact that she had no second mouth with which to acknowledge her inexperience in real time. Soon afterward, she’s recalling how the moment she felt she’d finally put together an adequate set of skills coincided with learning she’d gained a reputation.

“For me, the most vulnerable part of the show is [describing] that humiliation,” Novak says. “You’re fighting so hard to gain a kind of sexual confidence or vocabulary, and then the moment you have it, it’s like, ‘Oh, God.’ You’re running so hard in one direction, so afraid of one extreme, and then you have to be like: ‘No, I’m the innocent one! You don’t understand!’

“To be misunderstood in this way, it’s like, ‘This is such hard-won swagger!’” she adds with a laugh.

In early 2020, after the conclusion of the New York run, Novak embarked on a “Get on Your Knees” tour — to “get it in my bones,” she says — with a plan to tape the show and sell it as a special. After just one tour date in Canada, though, the rest of 2020 was effectively canceled. “I wasn’t as crushed as it would seem like I would be. Because after however long doing comedy” — it has been some two decades since Novak started out on the Washington-area comedy circuit, honing her skills at spots such as the DC Improv and the now-defunct Wiseacres in Tysons Corner — “I was just proud. Grateful to be, like, one of the big boys who had dates to cancel .”

She restarted the whole process in the summer of 2021: a run at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York, followed — this time successfully — by a multi-city, multiyear tour. The special was finally filmed at Manhattan’s Town Hall in June 2023, on a bare stage with camera and lighting work inspired by the analog look of Richard Pryor’s and George Carlin’s old specials from the 1970s.

Now, nearly five years after its New York debut, “Get on Your Knees” is finally taking on the form Novak and her team always envisioned for it. Watching the final edit of the special, Lyonne felt more moved than usual imagining its future audience. “Just imagining kids in their junior year in high school, or in college, taking on the dating scene. Even full-on grown-ups having this experience, of like, ‘Holy s---, I’m not alone in this world.’”

Novak, meanwhile, is adjusting to the reality that her bold declarations — that the penis, for example, in its fragility and sensitivity and general moodiness, is the human body’s most feminine body part — will soon be fully subject to interpretation beyond her control.

Her hope is that viewers will understand “Get on Your Knees” as a useful exercise in kicking the tires of conventional ideas. “I make that argument about the penis not because I think we all got it wrong,” Novak says. “It’s just to demonstrate that it’s all a choice, how we’re looking at it.

“Saying, ‘ This is dignity and this is shame,’ or, ‘ This is embarrassing and this is respectable’ — we’re locked in on certain judgments of how things are,” she adds, “and I find that sort of rude to the human spirit.”

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Jacqueline Novak’s one woman stand-up show, ‘Get on Your Knees,’ is coming to World Cafe Live

An off-Broadway favorite since its premiere in 2019, the show finds humor in the taboo.

“I actually don’t think oral sex is funny. I just think I’m funny,” comedian Jacqueline Novak said to The Inquirer.

That might seem strange coming from the comic whose one-woman show Get on Your Knees explores that very topic — at length — for well over an hour. Philadelphia audiences can verify Novak’s claim when she comes to World Cafe Live on May 11.

The show, which was described by the Just for Laughs festival as the “most high-brow show about blow jobs you’ll ever see,” is definitely about oral sex. And “It’s definitely stand-up,” she added. “That’s the descriptor I’m most concerned about delivering on.”

But what is it about this particular act that is worth devoting an entire hour and twenty-five minutes to? It’s a topic that she found interesting “from when I first heard about it and had concerns… to later when I wrestled with what it does or can mean,” Novak explained. “I find things interesting and pursue the interest. And other people find it funny, at times.”

Get on Your Knees has been an off-Broadway darling since it premiered at New York City’s Cherry Lane Theatre in 2019. Directed by fellow comedian John Early (of Search Party fame), the show has won over thousands of die-hard fans. Including Grace Maloney, 25, of Manhattan who tells us that she related to the show so much she’s seen it twice. “I had to bring two sets of friends to see it, knowing they had similar lived experiences,” Maloney explained.

Another GOYK superfan, New York’s Scott Interrante, 31, has similarly been drawn to Novak’s attention to detail. “I first saw Jaqueline Novak at a charity benefit concert where she did 10 minutes all about french fries and it was so funny,” he said. “I loved how she could dedicate so much time to a single topic, looking at it from every angle and getting so many jokes out of it. Get on Your Knees is like that on overdrive.”

After years of success off-Broadway and touring, Novak has decided that this latest stretch of shows will be her last.

“I don’t love saying goodbye,” she admits. “Maybe I’ll revive it in a few years, or do it on Christmas Eve for the next ten years,” she said. But there is one definite bright spot to look forward to — a Netflix special, which will be filmed in New York City on June 9.

“[It] depends on how long I spend editing it. I could go into that dark room and never emerge,” Novak joked when asked about a release date. “Hopefully in the next few months.”

For now, she’s looking forward to returning to Philadelphia. “I performed the show before in Philly and the audience was great so I thought I’d return,” she said, “If they’ll have me.”

“Get on Your Knees,” May 11, 7 p.m., World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St., https://www.jokesnovak.com/

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A Return to Stage Fright

Jacqueline novak on reviving her critically acclaimed live show  get on your knees  after a year away..

One night in early 2020, toward the end of the New York run of Get on Your Knees , I was in my dressing room doing a preshow routine. The classical house music and casual chatter of audience members floated backstage as I tinkered with my appearance. I smoothed my eyebrows with my middle fingers, gulped down espresso, tugged my pants up and my T-shirt down. My phone alerted me that I had been tagged in an Instagram post, and I opened it up without thinking. I was disoriented by what I saw: a selfie of two smiling audience members in the crowd, wearing matching Get on Your Knees sweatshirts.

After years of chasing stand-up success, I am used to seeing the audience not as fans, but as doubters — necessary adversaries who challenge me to win them over. When I took the stage that night, I was relieved to see they were far enough back to be invisible to me beyond the wall of light, because I wasn’t sure if their appreciation of me would help or hurt the show. Nerves, fear, and doubt have been a part of my stand-up for so long that I’ve made a home for them, and now I’m not sure I can do it without them. Is it a vestigial organ, or is it doing something? Whatever that something is, it’s been asleep for a year, but as I prepare to get back onstage, it thumps in the belly, familiar as ever.

My last performance of Get on Your Knees in New York was on February 16, 2020, after four extensions. I took a bow and really milked it. My boyfriend Chris and I celebrated around the corner at Via Carota and then flew back to L.A. where we had moved not long before. After arriving back home, I had a few weeks to prepare for my first big tour — a series of theater runs and comedy-festival performances of the show in Boston, Chicago, London, and more. The show was in me , as they say; I wasn’t afraid of anything other than whether I could find decent Airbnbs. The task upon me was to keep doing what I was doing, keep doing the show. And the show was like a swimming pool: scary to get into, but once I’m in the water, it feels like I’ll be colder if I get out.

Because I had those weeks before the tour started, I thought it’d be fun to do a bit of tinkering with the show. I imported the audio from every performance into GarageBand and spliced it up, joke by joke. Then I created a track for each joke. That track would feature a back-to-back collage of every night’s iteration of that joke. Then I could listen all at once, note which was the best version, and lock it in. I imagined that kind of thorough tweaking would be immensely satisfying and comforting. The fantasy is that I could optimize the show to such a degree that it would function like a suit of armor, a robotic one that moves on its own, so I could sleep my way through it. As tour dates started getting canceled because of COVID, I realized I had more time than I thought to tinker. I put the project aside for a few days … and then I forgot about it for a year.

Now that quarantine is coming to a close, I’ve decided to mount the show in New York again. Suddenly, I find myself less than two weeks from my first post-quarantine performance. That tinkering I thought I could do in a month, and then decided to spend a year on? That did not happen. And that’s fine.

What did happen was more, let’s say, organic. I puttered around inside during quarantine, not thinking about the show. I built trellises for bougainvilleas, hung plastic curtains on my balcony to block my neighbor’s aerosols, and shaved fennel with a weak knife in a desperate attempt to re-create a salad from Altro Paradiso I’d enjoyed immensely during GOYK ’s first New York run. A thought about my show would come to mind, and I’d text myself a note. Those notes were then stuck in a doc called “GOYKSHOW NOTES.” Simple shit. Not thorough.

I’d love to blame my inertia on quarantine, but I prefer to believe that some part of me recognized that the show is native to me, by definition a whole that can’t be endlessly optimized piece by piece. If I’m being honest with myself, I do not wish to sleep my way through the show inside a robot suit of my own making. I don’t think the sweatshirt duo would enjoy the show as much, or certainly not any more, that way.

I remember seeing Les Misérables with my family as a kid. While waiting for it to start, my dad, returning from the concessions stand, joked, “The director stopped me. Little Gavroche is sick, and the understudy too. They want to know if you can fill in?” Even though I knew it was a joke, I still felt the swell of nerves: Can I do the job of Little Gavroche?  

Despite performing my show Get on Your Knees over 138 times in New York City, a full year has passed. All of the cells in our body are completely turned over every seven years, is it? That means I’m one-seventh new. So I find myself approaching this next run, feeling that same feeling as I did as a kid. This time, however, I am not just the little girl in the theater, but I’m also the original Gavroche. Because the run was a success previously, I now have something to live up to. That woman who did the show last year isn’t here — can I fill in? It’s incredible that self-doubt is this adaptable. The old fear was, Am I good enough? As good as another?  Now it’s, Am I as good as myself?

Get on Your Knees was nominated for a 2020 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance. Tickets for New York and Boston tour dates are now on sale via Novak’s website .

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Jacqueline Novak’s Netflix Special About Blowjobs, ‘Get on Your Knees,’ Gets Premiere Date (EXCLUSIVE)

By Valerie Wu

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Jacqueline Novak’s comedy special “Jacqueline Novak: Get On Your Knees” will premiere on Netflix Jan. 23, 2024. The project is directed by Natasha Lyonne (“Poker Face”), who also serves as an executive producer.

Filmed at The Town Hall Theater in New York City, the special features the final performance of Novak’s touring stand-up show “Get On Your Knees,” which premiered in 2019 and sold out multiple times. This 90-minute “concert film-meets-comedy special” revolves around the blowjob and is described as “both raunchy and poignant, an unexpectedly philosophical, coming-of-age tale of triumph that pushes the boundaries of stand-up,” according to the press release.

Popular on Variety

“I felt like no stone was unturned. In the best possible way. A nearly talmudic dissection of a subject,” echoed radio personality Ira Glass.

Described by John Mulaney as “the Muhammad Ali of comedy,” Novak is a regular on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and hosts the health and wellness podcast POOG with Kate Berlant. Lyonne is known for starring in the TV series “Poker Face” and “Russian Doll,” the latter in which she served as creator and producer.

Along with Novak and Lyonne, executive producers on the special are John Early, Chris Laker, Mike Birbiglia and John Irwin.

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Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees Streaming: Watch & Stream Online via Netflix

By akritianand

Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees is a concert film-meets-comedy special that centers on the art of fellatio. Described as “simultaneously raunchy and poignant,” it unfolds as an unexpectedly philosophical journey and a triumph in the realm of stand-up comedy. Pushing the boundaries of the genre, the performance weaves a coming-of-age tale that explores life’s intricacies with a daring blend of humor and insight.

Here’s how you can watch and stream Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees via streaming services such as Netflix.

Is Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees available to watch via streaming?

Yes, Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees is available to watch via streaming on Netflix.

Comic genius Jacqueline Novak delivers a humorous and philosophical exploration of sexuality, the journey to adulthood, and a particular anatomical subject in this intimate stand-up special. With wit and insight, she combines laughter and contemplation, inviting the audience into a unique and entertaining reflection on the complexities of life, love, and laughter.

Watch Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees streaming via Netflix

Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees is available to watch on Netflix. It is a global streaming giant, revolutionizes entertainment with an unparalleled library spanning genres. From blockbuster films to binge-worthy series, it offers diverse, original content for every taste. With seamless streaming and exclusive releases, Netflix OTT captivates audiences worldwide, defining the epitome of on-demand, high-quality entertainment.

You can watch via Netflix by following these steps:

• Visit netflix.com/signup
• $6.99 per month (standard with Ads)
• $15.49 per month (Standard)
• $22.99 per month (Premium)
• Enter your email address and password to create an account
• Enter your chosen payment method

The cheapest Netflix Standard with Ads Plan provides all but a few of its movies and TV shows. However, it will show ads before or during most of its content. You can watch in Full HD and on two supported devices at a time.

Its Standard Plan provides the same but is completely ad-free while also allowing users to download content on two supported devices with an additional option to add one extra member who doesn’t live in the same household.

The Premium Plan provides the same as above, though for four supported devices at a time, with content displaying in Ultra HD. Users get to download content on up to six supported devices at a time and have the option to add up to two extra members who don’t live in the same household. Netflix spatial audio is also supported.

The Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees synopsis is as follows:

“This 90-minute “concert film-meets-comedy special” revolves around the blowjob and is described as “both raunchy and poignant, an unexpectedly philosophical, coming-of-age tale of triumph that pushes the boundaries of stand-up.”

NOTE: The streaming services listed above are subject to change. The information provided was correct at the time of writing.

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Natasha Lyonne on Directing Get on Your Knees , Jaqueline Novak’s Break-Every-Rule Standup Special

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Natasha Lyonne is excited to hear an interviewer refer to Jacqueline Novak’s Get on Your Knees — Novak’s freewheeling, often poetic, literary-reference-laden monologue about blowjobs — as a film. 

“ We think of it that way,” she explains. “Is it possible for a philosopher/poet to be as funny as Jacqueline Novak? I think that by virtue of the scale of her writing, a comedy special does accidentally become something of a film.”

Lyonne adds: “We do like to aim high. Why bother making something without a measure of grandiosity at the start? You need energy to keep going, especially with a low budget. … We’re playing as many filmic games as we can without it being absurd.”

The typical Netflix comedy special consists of a comic slowly prowling the stage, doing set-ups and punchlines and act-outs for a tight hour, interrupted only by shots of audience members laughing. The title usually comes from the best joke of the night, or some reference to the comic’s public image.

But Get on Your Knees breaks the formula. Novak spends 90 minutes on one subject, not going for easy puns, but exploring the power dynamics of sex acts, the expectations and fears everyone has going in, and how miscommunications are exacerbated by moments when at least one party isn’t talking. Racing around the stage, Novak travels back to her teen years, re-examining misunderstood intentions.

“Despite the show being personal and about blow jobs, I still don’t experience it as particularly confessional. Probably more intellectual,” Novak said in a recent interview with Rebellious Magazine .

In Get on Your Knees , she spends a lot of time talking about teeth, as well as Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita , and T.S. Eliot, and ghosts. She examines how the potentially painful and spiky parts of something can make it what it is. It’s no surprise she declined to reduce it to a more-typical 60 minutes.

“There were definitely internal discussions — should it be cut down so it’s a traditional Netflix hour?” Lyonne recalls. “And I’m so proud of her, speaking as an elderly wizard/great-great grandmother, I am so proud of her for sticking to her guns and her vision and saying, ‘Hey, the show’s the show. I’ve done it for years, and people seem to like it OK. And I guess if they don’t, they don’t — that’s the show I wrote.’” 

Natasha Lyonne on the Directing Inpsirations for Get on Your Knees

Lyonne, 44, started acting as a child, and has embraced an old-soul persona since her teens. She refers to everyone as kid , like George Burns used to do when he was twice her age.

To direct Novak’s special she turned to inspirations from decades past, including the work of Lily Tomlin and George Carlin, D.A. Pennebaker’s music documentaries, Bob Fosse’s 1974 Lenny Bruce biopic Lenny , Joe Layton’s 1982 Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Trip and Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia , which captured Spalding Gray’s monologue about traveling to Southeast Asia for a role in The Killing Fields .  

From the first time she saw an early version of Novak’s Get on Your Knees , Lyonne was struck not just by Novak’s comedy, but also by its three-act structure, and how loose and spontaneous Novak managed to make her setups and payoffs feel.    

“If you don’t have this bit, if you don’t have the A side, that doesn’t give you the B-side payoff. And who cares if it’s 40 minutes later? That’s the way the thing was crafted,” Lyonne notes. “So ultimately, you do end up with a sort of ’70s situation — because if you have an artist who’s willing to stick to their guns at that level, I mean, in the first place, you don’t see that anymore, you know? 

“Everything is about marketing and algorithmic comfort levels, and the terror of the completion rate: ‘Will the algorithm go for it? Will the kids on TikTok buy in?’ Once we’ve all completely drunk that Kool Aid, I’m not sure where it leaves us as a community. So it really is so cool to watch somebody believe in themselves and the power of their work that much.”

Get on Your Knees , which Lyonne presented and Mike Birbiglia executive produced, became an Off-Broadway word-of-mouth sensation when Novak started performing it at the Cherry Lane Theatre in 2019, with fellow comedian John Early directing. It scored repeat viewings, earned Novak a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Performance, and received widespread praise from top stand-ups including John Mulaney, who called Novak the “the Muhammad Ali of comedy.” 

Lyonne’s directing credits include episodes of her shows Orange Is the New Black, Russian Doll and Poker Face, as well as Shrill and High Fidelity . To film Get On Your Knees, she enlisted Frances Ha and Lady Bird veteran Sam Levy, with whom she worked while appearing alongside Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen in Azazel Jacobs’ new dramatic feature His Three Daughters. 

The special was recorded at The Town Hall, which Lyonne counts as a New York City landmark nearly as iconic as the subway. One of the highlights of the directing experience was delivering tips to the Town Hall team wearing a New York Yankees hat she had recently bought for a trip to London — “just to make sure that they knew where I was from.”

“They have their operation center of their spotlights and stuff, and I remember one of our most fun moments in our little 48-hour journey of filming was giving a pep talk, in my Yankees cap, with the entire Town Hall spotlight team, just being like, ‘She’s never gonna stop moving. And this is a low-budget special with little time for camera rehearsal. So just everybody, look alive,’” Lyonne recalls.

It was a familiar feeling, one that reminded her of appearing in 2011 with Ethan Hawke and Ann Dowd in the Tommy Nohilly play Blood From a Stone . Every night, she said, “we were as wired and terrified as if it’s the first time. … and it’s such a rush when you’re in the pocket.”

Novak would also try things onstage during the taping for the first time — very rare for a Netflix special. Comedians often spend months honing every syllable of their act before releasing it to the streaming masses.

“She does variations at her own sort of whims,” Lyonne says. “She would sort of try an old twist on an old bit.” 

One thing that didn’t change was the opening song, Madonna’s “Life a Prayer.” It’s a perfect introduction for many reasons – the allusions to kneeling, but also searching for something higher. And Madonna’s career has been largely dedicated to presenting a sexualized image while commanding control over it.  

Novak had used it on stage for her live performances, but Lyonne and the team were sure Madonna and her co-writer, Patrick Leonard, would never agree to let them use it for Netflix. So they sought advice from Novak’s cousin, songwriter-producer extraordinaire Jack Antonoff, about what music they should use instead.

“We’d be on all these calls with him, getting ahead of it and figuring it out, since we were never gonna get Madonna,” Lyonne explains.

But then Madonna said yes. Apparently she had gotten word of Get on Your Knees .

“We recently heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that Madonna on tour was like, ‘Wait a minute, that’s that special — like, I keep hearing about that girl, this Jacqueline Novak — I gotta see this.’ I guess word had gotten back to her. It was just genuinely kind.”

Lyonne hopes all the work that has gone into the film might benefit audiences, especially young women, sorting out their place in relationships and life.

“When we watch it in a final color session or something, I think what I’m most moved by is the idea of young women seeing this thing, and just being like, ‘Holy shit — I’m not the only one thinking these thoughts.’” Lyonne says. 

“And there’s something about the power and the scope and the scale of that song that really bolsters, in a way, that what Novak is saying is universal.”

Get On Your Knees is now on Netflix.

Main image: Jacqueline Novak at the Townhall in New York shooting Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees . Credit: Emily V. Aragones/Netflix © 2023

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Here's a Complete List of All New Stand-up Specials on Netflix This 2024

L ooking for a good laugh? Netflix has you covered with a lineup of fresh stand-up comedy specials from some of the funniest comedians around. Get ready to chuckle, giggle, and guffaw with these hilarious performances:

Pete Davidson: Turbo Fonzarelli

Dive into the comedic world of Pete Davidson as he takes center stage to share uproarious anecdotes and insights from his life. From childhood crushes on Leonardo DiCaprio to the bizarre encounters with ardent fans, Davidson’s candid and offbeat humor will keep you entertained from start to finish.

Dusty Slay: Workin’ Man

Join Dusty Slay for a rollicking ride through his distinctive brand of humor that’s equal parts homespun and hysterical. With a sharp wit and keen observational skills, Slay offers humorous takes on everything from the quirks of small-town life to the mysteries of modern culture.

Rachid Badouri: Les fleurs du tapis

Quebecois comedian Rachid Badouri brings his unique perspective to the stage in this candid and captivating stand-up special. With an infectious charm and unfiltered honesty, Badouri shares laugh-out-loud stories about navigating fame, confronting racism, and the ups and downs of success in the world of comedy.

Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees

Prepare for a thought-provoking and hilarious journey into the mind of Jacqueline Novak as she explores the complexities of sex, identity, and relationships. With her razor-sharp wit and incisive observations, Novak delivers a one-of-a-kind comedy experience that’s as enlightening as it is entertaining.

Jack Whitehall: Settle Down

Jack Whitehall takes the stage at London’s iconic O2 Arena for an unforgettable night of laughter and storytelling. From amusing anecdotes about dogs and dining alone to heartfelt reflections on fatherhood and family life, Whitehall’s wit and charm shine through in this uproarious stand-up special.

Taylor Tomlinson: Have It All

Comedian Taylor Tomlinson brings her signature blend of wit and wisdom to the stage as she explores the pursuit of happiness, success, and fulfillment. With her sharp observational humor and relatable anecdotes, Tomlinson offers hilarious insights into the challenges of modern life and the quest for “having it all.”

Mike Epps: Ready to Sell Out

Get ready for non-stop laughs as Mike Epps takes aim at everything from personal hygiene to office romances in this side-splitting stand-up special. With his quick wit and irreverent humor, Epps offers a hilarious take on the absurdities of everyday life that will leave you rolling in the aisles.

Chappelle’s Home Team – Donnell Rawlings: A New Day

Join Donnell Rawlings for a laugh-out-loud comedy experience as he shares uproarious stories and observations from his life. From navigating toxic relationships to the joys and challenges of co-parenting, Rawlings offers a fresh and funny perspective on the ups and downs of adulthood in this standout stand-up special.

Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda

Hosted by the incomparable Hannah Gadsby, this comedy showcase features a diverse lineup of genderqueer comics from around the world. With their unique perspectives and razor-sharp wit, these comedians deliver a hilarious and thought-provoking exploration of gender, identity, and the absurdities of modern life.

Steve Treviño: Simple Man

Steve Treviño takes audiences on a comedic journey through the trials and tribulations of marriage, family, and everyday life in this uproarious stand-up special. With his relatable humor and down-to-earth charm, Treviño offers laugh-out-loud insights into the joys and challenges of being a “simple man” in today’s world.

Red Ollero: Mabuhay Is A Lie

In his first major stand-up special, irreverent comedian Red Ollero takes aim at the absurdities of modern life with his razor-sharp wit and unapologetic humor. From the pitfalls of fast food to the awkwardness of sexual encounters, Ollero fearlessly tackles taboo topics and societal norms with hilarious results.

Brian Simpson: Live from the Mothership

Brace yourself for an unfiltered and uproarious comedy experience with Brian Simpson as he delves into the absurdities of everyday life. From navigating the complexities of masculinity to embracing his inner curmudgeon, Simpson pulls no punches in this hilarious and high-energy stand-up special.

Dave Attell: Hot Cross Buns

Comedy veteran Dave Attell returns to the stage with his trademark blend of rapid-fire jokes and no-holds-barred humor in this electrifying stand-up special. From the quirks of modern life to the joys of aging disgracefully, Attell covers it all with his signature wit and irreverence.

Demetri Martin: Demetri Deconstructed

Prepare to be entertained and enlightened as comedian Demetri Martin takes audiences on a whimsical journey through the absurdities of everyday life. With his unique blend of wordplay, visual gags, and deadpan delivery, Martin offers a hilarious and thought-provoking exploration of the human experience in this standout stand-up special.

The post Here's a Complete List of All New Stand-up Specials on Netflix This 2024 appeared first on New York Tech Media .