The comic Jacqueline Novak doesn’t like the term “oral sex.”

“It’s very dental,” she said with a note of disdain over lunch near the Cherry Lane Theater, where her solo show “Get on Your Knees,” a cerebral stand-up meditation on the sexual act, begins performances on July 10. “It’s also like saying, ‘You know how there’s sex? This is the oral version,’” she said, adding: “I see oral sex as its own thing. To me, oral sex seems more intimate than. …”

Ms. Novak paused, pondering whether to finish her thought, deciding against it, and moving on, before I returned to the subject with a follow-up question: Do you think oral sex is more intimate than intercourse?

“If you’re doing it right,” she said, with a screwball snap.

Amused at her own chutzpah, she smiled, shifting to a more dutiful explanation of how working on her new hour informs her view: “I spent a year and a half poeticizing oral sex, so it’s hard to not think that.”

Presenting an elevated take on lewd subject matter is characteristic of Ms. Novak’s charmingly eccentric comedy. She regularly veers between confidence and vulnerability, self-conscious pretension and goofy physicality. In her debut on “The Tonight Show,” she improvised a 360-degree twirl in the middle of a stand-up set.