“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 her 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.