Jacqueline Novak: How Get On Your Knees Turned Stand-Up Into Literature
Ninety-odd minutes on one subject, written like an essay and performed like a seduction. The story of Get On Your Knees, and of the writer-comedian behind it.
Jacqueline Novak is the comedian behind Get On Your Knees, a show about oral sex that critics kept comparing to literature. It began at the Edinburgh Fringe, ran Off-Broadway in 2019, toured for years, and arrived on Netflix in January 2024, earning her an Emmy nomination for writing. Novak is also the author of the essay collection How to Weep in Public and, with Kate Berlant, co-host of the cult podcast Poog.
What follows is the full picture: how a downtown New York stand-up wrote one of the most acclaimed solo comedy shows of the 2010s, what makes it work, and where to go next once you have seen it.
Georgetown, downtown, Broad City
Novak was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1982 and grew up in Chappaqua, New York. At Georgetown University she performed with the campus improv group alongside John Mulaney, a fact that tends to surprise people because their styles could not be further apart. Mulaney's comedy is crisp storytelling; Novak's is something closer to a spoken essay that keeps interrupting itself.
After college she worked the New York stand-up scene, especially the downtown alternative rooms, where she often hosted shows with John Early. The conventional credits came steadily: late-night sets on Late Night with Seth Meyers and The Tonight Show, a Comedy Central Half Hour, appearances on HBO's 2 Dope Queens, and an episode of Netflix's sketch anthology The Characters (2016). She also wrote for television, including Broad City and Good Talk with Anthony Jeselnik.
How to Weep in Public (2016)
Novak's book, How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings on Depression from One Who Knows, was published by Three Rivers Press in 2016. It is a mock self-help guide to depression, written by someone who has clearly lived inside the subject. The jokes are about the comic logistics of being sad (how to stay in bed, how to fake functioning, how to describe a feeling that resists description), but the book never treats depression as a quirk.
Read it as a companion to the stand-up. The voice is the same: long, looping sentences that build a ridiculous argument with complete seriousness, then puncture it. If Get On Your Knees left you wanting more of her prose, this is where to find it. Our guide to comedy and mental health puts it alongside other comedians who have written about depression.
Get On Your Knees: from Edinburgh to Netflix
The show started life at the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe under a different title, How Embarrassing for Her, and was then reworked in Los Angeles. Mike Birbiglia saw it with Natasha Lyonne and decided to produce it; John Early directed. In 2019 it opened Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village for a limited run, was extended, and moved to the larger Lucille Lortel Theatre nearby.
The New York Times made it a Critic's Pick and put it on its year-end lists for both theatre and comedy, an unusual double. Novak was nominated for a 2020 Drama Desk Award for outstanding solo performance. A national and international tour planned for 2020 was postponed by the pandemic and resumed in 2021.
Netflix released the filmed version, directed by Natasha Lyonne, on January 23, 2024. Later that year it was nominated for the Emmy for outstanding writing for a variety special.
| Year | Stage |
|---|---|
| 2018 | Edinburgh Fringe, as How Embarrassing for Her |
| 2019 | Off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre, then the Lucille Lortel; directed by John Early |
| 2020 | Drama Desk nomination; touring halted by the pandemic |
| 2021–2022 | US and international tour |
| 2024 | Netflix special (dir. Natasha Lyonne); Emmy nomination for writing |
Why Get On Your Knees works
On paper, the premise sounds like a club comic's ten minutes stretched to breaking point. In practice it is a show about language, adolescence and power that happens to be extremely dirty. Three things set it apart.
One subject, no exits
Most "themed" comedy hours are really collections of bits loosely gathered under a title. Get On Your Knees never leaves its subject. When it seems to digress (into etymology, into teenage diaries, into the history of how a word is used) the digression turns out to be another way of looking at the same thing. The discipline is the joke: how long can a person think about one act before the thinking becomes absurd, and then profound, and then absurd again?
Writing you can hear
Novak's sentences are built, not riffed. She uses clauses the way a novelist does, delaying the payoff, stacking qualifications, swapping registers between the academic and the crude. You can hear the essayist from How to Weep in Public. It is why the show rewards a second viewing; a lot of the best lines are hidden in the middle of sentences.
Performance as argument
The show's central idea is that the person performing the act is not the passive party the culture assumes. Novak's physicality, from the way she prowls the stage to the way she savours a word, embodies that argument. Early's direction keeps the staging spare so that her body and voice do all the work.
Poog with Kate Berlant
Poog is the podcast Novak co-hosts with her close friend Kate Berlant. It launched in 2020 on iHeartRadio's Big Money Players network as a show nominally about wellness: supplements, rituals, skincare, the language of self-optimisation. In practice it is two very fast, very verbal comedians talking about pleasure, consumption and their own neuroses, while gently mocking the wellness industry and also clearly loving it.
Time and Vulture both put it on their best-of lists in 2021. The iHeart run ended in October 2024 after more than 200 episodes, and the pair continued independently as Berlant & Novak. In April 2026 they reacquired the rights to Poog and relaunched it on their own. The John Early connection closes the triangle: Early directed Novak's show and is Berlant's longtime creative partner, and the three have been friends since their New York years. For more shows like this, see our guide to comedy podcasts.
After the special: new material in 2026
Novak spent years with one show. In 2026 she toured new stand-up across North America, billed simply as her 2026 tour, with stops at theatres and comedy clubs in cities including Chicago, Philadelphia and Salt Lake City, and a summer date at Bard College's Spiegeltent. She has not, as of October 2026, announced a title or filming plans for a follow-up special. That patience is consistent with how she made Get On Your Knees, which she developed on stage for years before it was filmed.
What other comedians can learn from Novak
- Depth beats breadth. A single idea explored from every angle can sustain an hour if you keep finding new angles.
- Write on the page, then test on stage. Novak's sentences have the density of prose because they were written as prose.
- Find a director. Bringing in John Early, a trained actor, turned a stand-up set into a piece of theatre.
- Use the festival circuit. The show's first version was an Edinburgh hour; it changed title and shape before it found its audience.
Frequently asked questions
What is Jacqueline Novak's Get On Your Knees about?
It is a single-subject comedy monologue about oral sex, and specifically about performing it: the anxieties, the language, the cultural myths and the strange intellectual life of a teenage girl trying to understand it. It ran Off-Broadway in 2019 and became a Netflix special in January 2024.
Where can I watch Get On Your Knees?
The filmed version, directed by Natasha Lyonne, streams on Netflix, where it was released on January 23, 2024. It earned Novak a 2024 Emmy nomination for writing.
Who directed Get On Your Knees?
John Early directed the stage production. Natasha Lyonne directed the Netflix special, and Mike Birbiglia was a producer of the Off-Broadway run.
What is Poog?
A comedy podcast Novak co-hosts with Kate Berlant, launched in 2020, in which the two riff on wellness culture, self-improvement and pleasure. It ran on iHeart until 2024; the pair then continued as Berlant & Novak and relaunched Poog independently in 2026.
Is Jacqueline Novak touring?
In 2026 she toured new stand-up material across North America under the banner Jacqueline Novak: 2026 Tour. Check her official site for current dates.