‘Do I overreach?”, asks Jacqueline Novak. Well, yes – no show ever overreached more, which is what makes Get on Your Knees such a remarkable comedy. The show, which arrives trailing all kinds of glory from Off-Broadway, is about the blowjob. It’s a philosophy of the blowjob, a spoof academic treatise on the blowjob, a personal history of blowjobs – and a full spate of ridiculous metaphors for the penis soft and hard and every which way to orally arouse it. In the long line of comedies borne of overthinking things not usually taken seriously, few ever over-thought to this spectacular effect.
There’s not much you don’t get in Get on Your Knees, a 90-minute show notable for its verbal profusion as well as its eye-catching subject matter. You get Novak the playful and skilful standup, mainlining that brand of intellectual superiority and brittle self-regard also practised by her podcast co-host Kate Berlant. (“As a woman of ideas, everything from the chin down feels beneath me.”) You get a handful of free-standing routines, about boyfriends’ dads or – and this one’s brilliant – the relationship between the confident and self-deprecating halves of Novak’s personality.
