How Jacqueline Novak Turned Blowjobs Into Poetry

Jacqueline Novak’s first Netflix special, Get on Your Knees, opens with Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” a fitting song considering the story Novak’s about to tell. On its surface, the special excavates everything we know about the blow job and, by proxy, the penis, in order to strip them both of their power. But dick jokes (actually funny ones) aside, Get on Your Knees is a meditation on literature, philosophy, womanhood, and several other subterranean layers. Within the first 15 minutes, Novak says of the male member: “I think the penis is a feminine icon, if I may be so bold.”

Novak first premiered the one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe Fest in 2018, which got stellar reviews from places like Voice Mag, who called it “gloriously rude.” She then took it to the Cherry Lane Theater in New York for a six-week run in 2019, which was quickly extended and lauded as “the funniest show about Cartesian dualism” by the New York Times. Covid delayed the national tour but she eventually took it to eight cities, including London, throughout 2021 and 2022.

The POOG co-host (who is currently recommending Talika Reusable Eye Therapy Patches) is now wondering if she should have made herself less known. “There is no true authentic presentation, so I wish I had presented myself as if I were turtle girl or something,” she told Jezebel. “Just from the start, it was all coming through the medium of a turtle and I could just be like, ‘Well, that’s the turtle, and then there’s me.’”

Non-turtle Jacqueline talked to Jezebel about finally releasing the ever-morphing Get On Your Knees, the glory and necessity of overreaching, and New Yorkers who stay at home and watch TV. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jacqueline Novak: It feels pretty good in this way of, “I did the thing.” It’s out and I’m trying to enjoy that. More than ever, I want to be really focused on what I’m doing, what I care about, and what matters versus living as an Instagram post, just waiting. Being a receptacle for it [art] very much appeals to me. That image of an artist making things and they’re just lost in the making of, and they release them, but it’s just a trail of work behind them…is the dream.

I saw Get On Your Knees in 2019 and it’s been morphing and evolving ever since. What’s it like knowing that the Netflix version is the final version?

I am always thinking of it like that but at the same time, it’s the exact same show. The journey is the same. It’s really the details and it always felt like it was, but the song was the same, right? It’s definitely been through this evolution in terms of me kind of evolving, changing with it, getting stage time with it, getting to perform in different places, singing it, or whatever.

The good news was we basically just kept it all. We did a full director’s cut from the outset. We did a little screening to kick it off, and I sat [in the back with] my partner Chris and we sat with Natasha [Lyonne]. I’ve seen it many times but sitting there, I actually did enjoy watching it and I was really, just really pleased with how it looked and all the filmy choices we made. That was actually creatively quite satisfying.

Well, the original thing was I wanted to make a comedy special and I’m working on this show and I put it up in LA and John’s supporting it and introducing me. He’s going to give me notes on the show, but it’s just really him coming up at the end and being like, “Oh, I love this part.”

That’s when Natasha came and saw it and said, “Is this going to be a special? Who’s directing? I want to direct this as a special.” These people were all supporting me—Natasha’s going to present the show and then she’s going to direct the special. And then John was willing to go on this full path with mounting it in New York. That was so intensive but it was very dinner-based…it was the joke. It was mostly just us getting dinner after. We’re all very in cahoots about it. Then it was, now me and Natasha are going to make this film. There was enough of a distance there for her to bring that director’s eye that was not so enmeshed.

When I just watched the special this time, I felt like I was really picking up a lot more on the literature and philosophy aspects of it. But it’s also a coming-of-age story

There’s this layer where it’s a show about standup. Which isn’t something I’ve said or whatever because it’s ten layers of meta. I draw that comparison right at the top of the show. [Novak opens the show describing how the journey from backstage to the microphone is hell and then turns it into a metaphor for the blow job.] But I am just thinking in a new way, the tensions in standup and the years of pursuing standup. It’s all the things that are challenging about it and how it raises all these weird questions about how people respond to you, how much to care about what their response is. All these things that are baked into standup, I get to talk about and explore in the show. I was just thinking about why this show does feel like the correct thing to be my first big ambitious, standup special. It does feel like a culmination of a lot of that I deal with in standup. It’s identity—am I this, or am I this? Am I feeling hemmed in by this? Am I this kind of girl? Am I this kind of girl? That’s really overly simplistic but for me, I think in one way, at its core, it’s me being irritated by certain dualities and then wanting to complicate them and play across self-expression—how you express yourself, the words we use.

“More than ever, I want to be really focused on what I’m doing, what I care about, and what matters versus living as an Instagram post.”

A more basic way to answer the question is, I wrote a personal essay in college that traced the coming-of-age narrative through hearing about the blowjob. I always thought I was holding onto it as a thread for a book or something, and then it seemed like a frame that would allow me to be a little magnet for all the other things…and cramming all these contradictions that I don’t think together all at once. As you can see, I’ve thought about the show to the point where now I can’t even make sense…

The show is very intimate since so much is based on your own experience but it also feels universal in a way that lets people imprint their own meaning and experiences.

I’m always aiming for that or investigating your own experience. That’s always, to a certain degree, just me and my philosophizing. I’m exhausting myself. [laughs] Standup is fucking bizarre. It’s a really bizarre thing to put oneself into. There are a lot of words and there’s a lot of room for interpretation in that other, not because I leave a lot of verbal room.

The joke is that, to me, the show is about, they’re telling me it’s about the penis or the blowjob but for me, it’s about arguing for overreaching. The glory of overreaching or the beauty of falling short, the necessity of the overreach. It’s literally about shit like that and then all the subject matter and content is truly just the tangible materials of which I’m trying to argue that.

For me, it feels like mythology in some ways now at this point.

It’s out there living. My friend in New York, who worked on the show in various capacities, sent me a video. He looked out his window and could see it playing on a TV across the street. For whatever reason, I’ve always had this thing, particularly in New York, I just love seeing a TV on. There’s something so cozy and comforting. Also in this city, they’re in this most vibrant city, and they’re just in their little nest. It’s humanizing in this way, it even kind of sweetly undercuts the idea of the New Yorker, you know, they’re just in there watching TV. It’s one of my favorite things. And then the other thing I love about it is the mystique of you walking by some insane apartment building, and you can see art in there and then you see something on the TV. For me, him seeing it tiny through a window was hysterical. That was really satisfying.