This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC studios and the New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.

Now, sex jokes have been around since forever.

You may know the old one about the women who decide to withhold from their men

until they knock off fighting a war, the Peloponnesian war.

The men get in a huff, they walk around in, let's say,

an extended state of agony, and finally, they cave in.

The war ends.

A great celebration ensues.

That's the plot of the comedy Lissistrada, a play by Aristophanes from 4-11 BC.

It's a pretty great political joke, political and sexual at the same time.

Now a few millennia later, comedian Jacqueline Novak works a similar groove, but she's created

something entirely original.

Her debut on Netflix is a show called Get On Your Kneeze.

It's a comedy special, sure, but not at all a string of setups and punchlines.

You can get that anywhere.

Novak's performance is a rant.

It's blazingly fast, full of illusions and sly jokes

and political pot shots that go by so quickly

that you'll sometimes miss a few of them and want to watch again.

It's about sex, power, the dilemmas of women, the vanities of men, not to mention the absurdities of anatomy.

Well, it's tender, it's responsive, you springs up under certain conditions.

...