84 new york | september 16–29, 2019
She’stheidealwomanofthe Ptolemaic
period, described as “demure” yet “allur-
ing.” Perhaps because her upper torso
has been lopped off.
“I can’t tell what she’s thinking,” Jac-
queline Novak tuts dryly in front of the
broken figure. “It’s nice that these statues
do tend to have a lower belly of some sort.
It’s not a complete washboard, which I do
find comforting.”
We step out of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art’s Temple of Dendur and take a seat
above the reflecting pools, just beneath
the picturesque slant of the floor-to-ceil-
ing windows. Novak sits cross-legged
and empties the contents of her purse—a
toothbrush, $31, a pair of black-and-
white Adidas soccer socks—to unfurl the
gray T-shirt she bought during a
Bloomingdale’s quest to find the perfect
one for her show. She likes it—it’s
heathered and doesn’t have that stripy
effect under the stage lights—but it’s still
not the Platonic ideal. Every night for
her acclaimed one-woman show, Get On
Your Knees, which is ostensibly about
blow jobs but is really about how we
think about our bodies, she wears a vari-
ation on the same monochromatic pal-
ette: gray shirt, washed-out black jeans,
and gray-and-white sneakers. It is an
attempt to “neutralize the form,” she
says, meaning the female body. Her body.
“Which is kind of an irritating thing to
feel like one has to do.”
Novak would prefer to be the opposite
of poor Tagerem: just a floating head and
nothing else. Or maybe a ghost. What-
ever. The point is, she’s constantly in her
head, assessing not only the object but all
the social meaning thrown upon it. The
female form feels particularly burden-
some. “Every day, you leave the house
with goals and dreams and things to do,”
she says in Get On Your Knees. “You’re
forced to lug [your body] along like a sack
of sex potatoes, constantly having to say ...
‘No taters for sale tonight, boys.’ ”
Get On Your Knees became a sensation
during its sold-out run at the Cherry
Lane Theatre this summer through a
combination of critical praise and star
power: Attendees have included Lorde,
Amy Poehler, Emma Stone, and Sally
Field. Now it has been extended for one
final run at the Lucille Lortel Theatre
through October 6. (As for its life
beyond, Novak would like to go on tour
and film it as a special.)
The show, which sits somewhere
between a theatrical monologue and a
stand-up-comedy set, is Novak hitting
her stylistic stride. Her work has always
been ironically high-minded in a way you
might expect from someone who studied
creative writing and linguistics at
Georgetown. She had been doing stand-
up for years but didn’t begin to find her
comedic voice until she immersed her-
self in the alt-comedy scene in New York
with like-minded people who could
apply basic gender theory to cum jokes.
Then an invitation to participate in the
Edinburgh Fringe Festival last summer
challenged her to put together an hour-
long set. Her friend the comedian John
Early came on to direct, and Natasha
Lyonne and Mike Birbiglia lent their
names as producers.
Novak’s mind is always abuzz, some-
times flitting between various observa-
tions like an overstimulated bumblebee
surrounded by wildflowers—a result, she
says, of her “unmedicated ADD.” And
while there are plenty of digressions in
Get On Your Knees, they inevitably loop
back to a narrative, turning the act of giv-
ing a blow job into an epic bildungsro-
man. It’s The Odyssey meets a Frenchsemiotician’s wet dream. Like Odysseus,
Novak learns to navigate the treacherous
waters of female heterosexuality—how to
avoid a toothy blow job and preserve the
male ego (the Scylla and Charybdis of oral
sex)—and, like a post-structuralist, she
delights in dismantling the inherent,
cough, patriarchy of language.
I ask Novak how old she is, to get a
sense of how long she’s been at this, and
she balks. While I could figure it out on
my own, did this information need to be
included? Because once someone knows
your age, it locks you in their mind, and a
whole bunch of judgment is placed upon
you—whether you’re far enough along in
your career, what you should be doing
with your life. And that’s especially true if
you’re a woman, and a woman working in
comedy, at that. Getting older has always
bummed her out, like when she turned 17
and realized the movie Sixteen Candles no
longer applied to her. It was this sense ofconstant loss; you could never go back.
“Fuck it,” she says. “I’m 36.”
She takes particular interest in decon-
structing the penis itself. After all, if you
were to choose a part of the body to sym-
bolize masculinity, the penis, Novak says,
“feels like a desperate attempt to cover for
its vulnerability, by going, like, ‘No, it’s
strong! And if you say it’s not strong, I’ll
kill you!’ ” She devotes a section to dis-
mantling all the words we use to prop up
the phallus: rock-hard boner, penetrate,
anaconda. In her hands, the penis
becomes soft and delicate, like a flower.
It’s not a weapon of mass destruction but
a drama queen who wilts on the fainting
couch soon after climax. It is the most
hysterical part of the male body.
“I don’t think of myself as doing a
bunch of jokes about penises, really, even
though obviously I am,” she says earlier
that morning over a breakfast of eggs and
trout crêpes under the stern eye of a
waiter at Café Sabarsky. “Someone in an
interview was like, ‘Oh, what’s your blow-
job technique?’ I was like, ‘I’d rather not
answer that. Did you see the show?’
Because I don’t really have any opinions
on blow jobs. It’s an idea I’m exploring,
more than anything else.”
“Sometimes I think my heterosexuality
is a sham,” she goes on. “I just slowly
socialized myself to the idea of the male
body. I mean, I intuitively had crushes on
boys in an abstract-gender way versus
bodily. And that’s actually a big reason
that I’m asking myself, What is the penis?
Because I’ve never been, like, Am I really
into penises as an object? I had to adjust
to, like, not being horrified by a penis.”
Still, ever since her childhood in West-
chester County, her ideas around sex have
been startlingly precocious. When she
was 4 years old, a little-boy classmate
asked her if she had a penis. “I said, ‘No,
I have a vagina,’ ” she remembers. “And
then he goes, ‘Does your mom have a
vagina?’ I said, ‘Yes, but hers has feathers.’
So I was young enough to have sort of a
general feather perception. You know,
like not pubic hair.” Her teachers were
amused, so when her mother came by,
they recounted the story. “When my mom
walked out of the office, she flapped her
wings,” Novak says, laughing.
A similar thing happened when a
group of girls in elementary school asked
her if she knew what a period was. She
gave a clear textbook answer: that it
occurs when the body sheds its uterine
lining. “They were like, ‘No! It’s when you
bleed out of your vagina!’ ”
“The curse of real knowledge,” she says,
shaking her head. “I was the fool.” ■“You’re forced
to lug [your body]
along like a sack
of sex potatoes,
constantly
having to say ...
‘No taters for sale
tonight, boys.’ ”The CULTURE PAGES