When comedian Jacqueline Novak says that her whole show will be about blowjobs, she’s not joking. And her show lasts 90 minutes. But Novak is nothing less than hilarious, and while the show is very funny, it’s never crude. She turns oral sex into a philosophical discourse.
Novak is well-read. Hanging out in Borders Books in America as a teenager means that her routine is unexpectedly literary. She invokes the fatalism of the Greek Gods and considers Freud’s theories on the hysteria outbreak of the late 19th Century. She brings in Nabokov, T.S. Eliot, and even the refrigerated plums of William Carlos Williams. All these references inspire her in the quest to turn oral sex into an art form, and she wants to be the best.
But the journey from novice to A-grade student is not easy, and Novak is at her most comic when she tells the story about her early experiences, guided under the tutelage of her best friend’s sister’s best friend who proclaims that she is the queen of blowjobs. She says it without irony, and as she wraps up a cucumber in cellophane, a young Novak can only look on with awe.
It may all sound tawdry, but the American comic also makes acute observations about everyday life, like swinging around a plastic bag containing two satsumas while waiting at the bus stop. She describes that simple joy of twisting the handles one more turn anti-clockwise before letting the bag spin in the other direction. Now just imagine if the bag was the scrotal sac, and the satsumas, balls…
Get On Your Knees is wildly funny, but Novak’s coming-of-age story has something of the epic about it. She’s an Iphigenia hurtling towards tragedy, a siren that lures men with promises and a stoic Joan of Arc even as the flames lap around her. She won’t give up and nor will she stop talking. The end is as dramatic as any Shakespearean play. Her performance encourages such hyperbole.
Being so focussed on giving men pleasure it would seem if Novak is doing it for the boys. However, she makes it clear that she’s doing it for the girls. But both will be on their knees at the end of this sharply outrageous show. Novak must be the funniest woman alive.
Runs until 2 April and then at Leicester Square Theatre 24-25 June 2022
