Jacqueline Novak's Get On Your Knees Edges Towards Greatness

After seeing Jacqueline Novak’s Get On Your Knees at the Bell House and loving it, I looked forward to watching the Netflix version as one might look forward to getting coffee with an old friend.

It turns out, the special was more like FaceTiming that friend while they’re walking home from the gym. You’re still happy to see them, but it’s not the same. Something got lost in translation. There is a warmth, and intimacy, that’s missing here.

Let’s start with what didn’t work in the special. Novak paces briskly across the stage, a fine action in person where your eye simply glides from one side of the stage to another, but it becomes frenetic when translated onscreen. The camera follows her largely at a medium close up, blurring the wall behind her and emphasizing a back and forth movement that can be distracting. Angled bird’s eye shots make Novak look small and isolated, lighting shifts in odd ways, occasionally giving her a soft ’80s glow. At times, you can see a piano backstage through the open stage door, either an odd choice or a mistake. The spotlight can’t quite keep up with her, bouncing unsteadily around and sometimes casting her face in darkness before adjusting.

Maybe it seems like I’m harping on aesthetics too much, but Novak’s comedy is dense, and it forces you to pay attention. These are jokes for people who subscribe to The New Yorker and listen to NPR, and because of that, the expectations are higher. Novak herself knows the power of imagery. She mentions that her favorite way to read Lolita was in the window of a pizzeria, clad in her field hockey skirt, tempting passersby to ogle at the view like a pervy Norman Rockwell painting. The special, a strong showing for Novak as a comedian, is oddly sloppy in showing Novak to a broader audience.

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Now let’s talk about what does work. It’s the smartest special about blowjobs you will likely see in your lifetime. She wanders on well-worn ground for female comedians—dicks and women’s magazines and a boyfriend’s father reprimanding her for overusing the word “like.” Classic lady stuff, am I right? But Novak is approaching these subjects in a way that seems to isolate them from the cultural storm happening in their name and instead presents them so that makes them feel new, unsullied by years of arguing whether this or that is feminist or sexist. She finds new angles, creates new alleys in which to explore. It is very difficult to find a non-cliche way of describing how you lost your virginity. Novak finds it.

There are George Carlin-isms as she deconstructs the sounds of various words we use to describe male appendages. This kind of analysis, like a scientist with a microscope, can be tricky, but Novak knows not to spend too much time analyzing the Petri dish. There are larger topics to discuss, like whether she could bite off someone’s dick if the opportunity arose, a particularly good tangent. Her words are carefully weighed, and positioned in very specific parts of her sentences. She certainly does have a poetic sensibility, one that pays careful attention to its sentence structure. Novak is clearly in control.

With every word placed so carefully, it runs a bit long. At an hour and a half, the special can sometimes be a bit too loquacious for its own good. A tangent about ghosts could have probably been cut, though I appreciate the placement of a topic early on so that she can call back to it later.

Novak isn’t going for purely emotion here, even as many of her contemporaries lean heavily on it (Rothanial, Nanette, and depending on how much you think is real, Inside). This allows her a kind of cool detachment, acting as a narrator rather than someone actually in the story. It largely works as a device, as Novak is a deft narrator, but the self-awareness can sometimes make it feel like the stakes of a situation aren’t really that high. Boyfriends come and go with little fanfare, a reversal of how women are presented in male-centric stories, but this can sometimes undercut the vulnerability of the act of fellatio. I think (I hope) Novak really liked her boyfriends, and that would certainly add pressure on getting the blowjob right or wrong. As it stands right now, the pressure seems more on just doing it right rather than doing it right for someone she cares about.

Again, these are nitpicky notes and if you’re on the fence about watching the special let me just say: You should absolutely watch it. To call Novak’s comedic voice “unique” would be again using a cliche that I think it surpasses. Get On Your Knees received rave reviews as a stage show, and it absolutely deserves that hype. I only hope that Novak’s next streaming venture does the show justice.

Michelle Cohn is a New York-based writer and pop culture enthusiast. Follow her on Twitter @michcohn.