Jacqueline Novak on her comedy special Get On Your Knees and putting penis jokes into iambic pentameter

Jacqueline Novak’s new special Get On Your Knees is ostensibly about a “certain body part,” per Netflix’s description, but on this she would like to correct the record. The show, she says, is about overreaching; she didn’t set out to make penis jokes, “I was just forced to, to make my points,” she explains to The A.V Club. The comedian had more than three years to hone those points to perfection, culminating in an unmissable performance.

Novak is a person who wants her point to be understood—you can tell by the way she manages to fit so much into the special, choosing the precise, perfect words that will draw the audience towards its immensely satisfying crescendo. Get On Your Knees represented “getting to do the ego dream of, like, ‘let me tell you how it is, how it went, how I reacted, and what I think about it,’” she tells us. “Like, it’s full l’esprit d’escalier, or whatever. The whole show is that: what I wish I said.”

We may not have the luxury of that polished perfection in daily life, but conversation with Novak will nevertheless take you down the same kind of thoughtful and surprising pathways that characterize Get On Your Knees, from the confidence instilled by collaborators John Early and Natasha Lyonne to how she’d be perceived by visitors from another planet. For the record: If they did show up, “and had any interest in stand-up comedy,” Novak says, “I’d be embarrassed that I’d be identified” as someone who makes penis jokes. There’s a lot more to Get On Your Knees, and to Novak, as she shared with The A.V. Club.

Jacqueline Novak: You’d think that having done it so long, I’d have a really tight answer. I say it’s about the blow job—I sort of pretentiously pushed it, it’s about the blowjob versus blow jobs, plural. For some reason, the blow job to me makes it more conceptual. And that’s kind of the vibe of the show: it has this organizing topic, and my changing thinking about it from the time I first heard of the blow job in middle school through high school and college, basically. It just felt to me like a through line to talk about all sorts of shit. So it’s like an hour and a half stand up show with this blow job narrative holding it together.

It’s sort of like I’m doing raunchy and then kind of philosophical, trying to kind of jam those two together. So it’s a little playfully over the top, sort of poetical at times. I sort of joke that it’s trying to resolve the Madonna/whore complex. Something along those lines. But you can’t quote me as saying it like that, dead serious. That’s the problem … it makes me laugh to be kind of a blowhard and then I’m like, “In print it is even coming off?” And then I’m just like, “Well, maybe it’s fun to be a blowhard, so who cares.”

AVC: This has been a years long process for you from developing the show to performing it, getting interrupted by COVID, relaunching it, touring with it, and now it’s finally going to be out in the world, accessible to everyone on Netflix. Can you talk about the arc of your relationship to the show and if your feelings towards the material have changed over the course of these years?

JN: A thing that gets in my way is having tons of different ideas. So, in order to set aside all these distractions, I really had to tell myself, like, “Focus on this one thing.” I knew it was going to be a long haul, because I basically decided, “I have to take a big fucking swing and put everything I have to give into this and forget about trying to get the industry interested.” And if nothing falls into place, then at least you stand by the work and know you created something.

But because I decided I’m gonna work this one stand-up piece until it works, until people respond to it, I just decided there would be no abandoning the project. There was a peace in just submitting myself to that reality, like, “It doesn’t matter whether I’m doing this or that, or if people think I’m a successful comedian. I’ll go do it in a backyard show, I’ll do it at Edinburgh, I’ll do it at a comedy club in Philadelphia, Peoria, Illinois, whatever.”

So all to say, because I knew I was just committed to the project in full, it had to be something that struck me as a challenge. If something’s gonna keep me interested, it’s because I’m trying to crack it. I think with the show, I felt like I was trying to crack it every night, the entire time I was doing it. I felt like I was still trying to crack it the night I was taping it.

AVC: Watching the special, it also struck me that it’s really like this act of athleticism—you have the joke about staying in constant motion, but also just the sheer volume of thoughts that you’re delivering in this near unbroken stream. Could you talk about the practice of performing something that dense?

JN: It was almost the only way I could do it. Kind of overloading myself with so many ideas in this way allows me to get out of my head, weirdly. The athletic part, the challenge of like, “Keep it moving. Gotta get to this. Okay, I said this.” And even though they’re laughing, I’m not sitting there enjoying their laughs. I’ve, like, never experienced an audience laugh. [Laughs] I’m never like, “Ha ha!” Literally it’s like, “On to the next.” I think it was like how you lose self-consciousness when you’re super focused and have something challenging ahead of you.

AVC: The structure of the show itself is just so masterful. There’s that moment towards the end, where you have this scream of ecstasy when all the themes are coming together. And it’s such a reflection of the way that the show connects physical pleasure to spiritual fulfillment and intellectual stimulation. How do you go about putting those puzzle pieces together to get to that moment?

JN: That is shit that like … structure totally blows me away. I marvel at structure when I’m watching something. And not because I’m seeing the moves made, but because it’s invisible. The first time, I’m listening to just jokes, like, “What the fuck just happened? How did they do that to me?” I can get really obsessive about structure, to a point of paralysis in other projects.

I found in my notebook, in some notes about the show, right in the margin I just wrote, “Too many themes as usual.” It’s not even truly narrative if you break it down. It feels like this quest or something, but it’s actually like, three scenes in which someone said a thing to me. But having the linear [structure of], “Here’s how I felt and what I thought then, here’s what I felt and thought this time, here’s what I felt and thought that [time],”…that simplicity really helped. And I think jokes and observations as the units of meaning that can express those phases of my thinking is another limitation that’s good.

The fact that, in the end, I get to bring it all together, just straight up through an artificial, highly constructed speech—even that I experimented with, because I was revising it up until and during previews. I basically tried to put it into iambic pentameter. It’s like: [reciting from the show with Shakespearean rhythm] “What is my mouth if it does not have teeth?” I remember reading that if you read in iambic pentameter it sounds natural. But it’s like, just applying another artificial limitation.

I get the most satisfaction out breadth, not depth. I can’t help it. I’ve posed this question before to an editor once when they were asking for depth, and I was like, “Wait, I’m not being sarcastic, but philosophically, why is depth better than breadth?” It’s just a different direction. You could drill down into the earth and come up either side, or you could circle the Earth over and over again. If anything, the circling is more infinite—maybe that’s why it becomes meaningless. But anyway, [to] be moving along and tracking these different things that to me, kind of connect laterally, and then sort of really jamming them together in the end, that just pleases something in me.

AVC: You had such a murderers’ row of talent that’s supporting this show. John Early directed the stage shows; Natasha Lyonne directed the special. What was it like collaborating specifically on something that’s so personal and what do you feel working with them brought to a show that’s so unique to your perspective?

JN: Well, a huge, huge thing that cannot be overstated is … different artists need different things from people. John was almost like, “I’m not going to note the text.” There was this underlying sense from the start that they trusted my text and whatever choices I’ve made within it. This kind of faith in that, that allowed me to then have faith in [myself].

I remember before opening [off Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theater], I said to Natasha, “It’s not like I’ve since turned it into some show show.” I just wanted to make sure that she didn’t appear on opening night in this fancy theater [and think], “Wait, what the fuck?” And she’s like—I forget how she phrased it—but almost like, “No, honey, I saw what I saw. I signed on for that.” Anyway, all to say, this kind of faith in me, and then expressing that, is a huge piece of feeling confidence in oneself.

AVC: This show is obsessive about one particular topic. Looking towards the future, are there any subjects that you’re really obsessing over at the moment, now that Get On Your Knees is closing a chapter?

JN: You know, there’s a few things floating around that are areas of interest. Or things I’ve touched on a little bit and [wondered], “Okay, do I blow that out fully?” You know, I love ghosts, I love food. Like, “Okay, I didn’t get to get all my ghost shit into that special, is it that?” I wonder; I’m not sure.

AVC: Do you feel like the narrowing in on a topic in the way that you do in the special is a mode you’d like to continue to explore, or do you think that the next thing—you’re also an author, so whatever the next thing is—will be totally different?

JN: It could very well just happen that I start on one thing and then I can’t shut up about it. I think the reason the blow job thing worked is because I didn’t feel like it was about blow jobs. I felt like it was about all these other things. So if I find another sort of micro, mundane, whatever the thing is, I could do that again if I feel like I’m getting to say more.

But also at times when I was performing Get On Your Knees, every night felt like I was this lawyer getting up to make my trial case again, almost like it was a recurring dream. And every night [I was] like, “Am I going to pull it off?” And every time I’m saying the words, I’m going, “I already used the best words.” Like, the whole fuckin’ way through. And even though [the words] basically stayed mostly the same, they were always technically on the chopping block in my mind. “Just because [that word’s] been here for two years doesn’t mean I’m not going to drop it into flames at any second.” That was my feeling towards the words.

I would have these moments where I was like, “Wouldn’t it be fun to write an hour of just one liners that just take you all over and fucking hone ’em and go out there and sing ’em like a song?” Just the opposite of going through this emotional journey [of Get On Your Knees], this enactment of me reconciling my whole life. I could just get up and give my thoughts about pizza a proper platform, finally! That does sound really nice. So it’s very TBD, I guess.