Watching the trailer for Jacqueline Novak’s Get On Your Knees, you would be forgiven for thinking you’re about to watch a comedy special plagued by internalized misogyny. A joke comparing the female anatomy to a hamburger at first feels like it could be pulled from a podcast hosted by white men. “Yeah, there’s a risk of a sudden disassembly,” the comedian jokes. “But it holds, it holds. The vulva is the burger that holds.”
Yet any interpretation of Novak as misogynist is quickly dispelled within the first five minutes of her latest one-woman show, which premiered on Netflix this week. Instead, she does an almost complete 180 from its trailer through a stand-up special that is ultimately a feminist triumph.
Opening the show, Novak compares her entrance to that of giving a blow job, a theme that dominates the show’s 94-minute runtime. Even her entrance song, Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” establishes the themes of sex and coming of age that will pervade her comedy.
ADVERTISEMENT
At times, audiences might be forgiven for thinking they’ve inadvertently attended a poetry slam, with Novak deploying years of literary consumption to describe everyday conundrums. One example: Doggy style becomes ‘The Hound’s Way’, likened to “two pioneers heading West.”
It’s a tone that can be difficult to adjust to, juxtaposing crass anecdotes with flowery metaphors and overcomplicated synonyms. But as Novak’s stream of consciousness continues at breakneck speed, the diary-like insight into her teenage years becomes equal parts comedy and philosophical exploration.
The central thesis is this, posed in the show’s latter half: “Can a blow job be a love letter?”
To answer this question, Novak first begins with a scientific analysis of sexual anatomy. With women’s organs representing the butcher, men become the florist. Next, Novak offers a lesson in linguistics, dissecting the language used to describe the anatomy, weighing the pros and cons of terms like “penis” and “cock.”
The language is crude—and not just for a female comedian. Being a woman in comedy poses some unique challenges. You cannot rest on your laurels and be “funny for a woman.” You need to be funny, full stop. But when being a female comedian so often relies on anecdotes about being a woman, it becomes impossible to separate the two.
But comedy can also be an effective way to make feminism more palatable. Viewers that wouldn’t go to a feminist lecture might go and see a woman perform comedy. Comedians shouldn’t have a responsibility to further an agenda, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to take a few hits at the patriarchy while you’re at it.
Novak seems to recognize this in many of the jokes she makes. Whether she is ranting about the invented phenomenon of “blue balls,” or about the pressures for women to remain pure, she manages to point out the hypocrisy of many of the gender ideals that influence relationships.
Her special mirrors the women’s magazines she encounters when she is 11, or the older girls at 12 who first teach her about blow jobs. While she is eager to remind audiences not to take her story as a cautionary tale, the hyperfixation on women’s sexuality serves as an embarrassing empowerment. It is a special for the awkward bookish girls, unfamiliar with sex but plenty familiar with linguistics and reading about sex.
It is a far cry from the empowerment someone like Gwyneth Paltrow might preach in which girls are encouraged to stare at their vaginas in a mirror and tell themselves that they are beautiful. But it feels like empowerment nonetheless.
Novak’s guiding philosophy is authenticity. She is vulnerably authentic in the way that she intimately describes the embarrassment of trying and failing to give her first blow job at 16. She is painfully authentic when she later admits to being told that she gives “toothy blow jobs.”
But Novak is never the butt of these jokes. Instead it is the men in her stories who the audience laughs at. It’s the boyfriend’s dad who tells her that she uses “like” too much, or the men who tell her to “choke on it”, to which she responds, “Is that what you want? The look of fear and panic in my eyes?”
Fed up of “coddling the male ego”, Novak has grown frustrated by the essential effort of being a woman in the presence of men, trying to win them over with something as base as oral sex. Reflecting on the special’s title, Novak declares, “I’m not degraded when I kneel down” in the ultimate reclamation of power.
Everything is embarrassing when you’re a teenage girl: your toothy smile, your “sack of sex potatoes” body—even the vulva itself.
If there is one thing Novak declares to be true in her special, it’s that she is not simply “the blow job queen,” nor a character in a Vladimir Nabokov short story, but the definition of a modern female comedian. She is not funny for a woman, but few comedians have used their womanhood so effectively on stage.
