Gettin' Tiggy With It

"Hello, how are you? I have cancer!” This is not how Tig Notaro starts a conversation, but how she, unintentionally, kickstarted her career. On a 2012 summer day in Los Angeles, Notaro walked on-stage and confessed just that; having learnt, the day before, that she had stage II breast cancer.

If comedy is, at least in part, a coping mechanism for the sentient mammal against the horrors of mortality, then here was Notaro, laying it all out: comedy and tragedy as one. It was, for the 43-year-old comedian, the final fuck-that moment in a year-from-hell, which included a bout of pneumonia, a life-threatening bacterial infection, the death of her mother, and the end of her long-term relationship. Up until that moment, Notaro had been a ‘comedian’s comedian’, a cult, queer comic notable for her starch-dry deadpan delivery. But, with the weight of a potentially-fatal illness off her shoulders, things soon changed.

“Even when I started getting paid properly for gigs, and I was on TV, I couldn’t take it seriously.”

Louis CK called it “one of the greatest standup performances I ever saw.” When a recording was released, digitally, as Tig Notaro Live, CK posted the set on his website. Within six weeks, it’d sold over 100,000 copies. It eventually landed Notaro a Grammy nomination, and became her calling card: she’d soon appear on The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien and This American Life, be signed to a book deal, and deliver a TED talk. Now, Notaro will be returning to Australia for the first time since 2011, for a run of high-profile shows.

“Everything that’s happened, it’s been way beyond anything I ever could’ve dreamed of,” marvels Notaro; the horrors of the past having given way to a blessed run – newfound health, new love, new levels of success – that continues to this day. Though Notaro is a fan of talking to the crowd (“sometimes, if I’m talking to someone in the audience who I’m fascinated by, it’s hard for me to get back on track; I feel like I just wanna keep talking to that person”), her latest show, Boyish Girl Interrupted, leans heavily on her life, both in its darkest moments, and in all that’s happened since.

“Everything that’s happened has given me so much perspective, both on the world and on myself,” offers Notaro, from on the road in St Louis. “Getting to travel and talk to people, it’s really personal, sharing your story, making that connection. But you also see how huge the world is, and how tiny you are; I’m just a little person on a planet that’s so vast. The amazing thing is that, when I’m telling people my story, the reactions to it everywhere are the same. There is this really universal quality in people, this capacity for empathy and humanity, and that’s such a comforting thought, to me.”

Notaro’s reputation as a comic’s comic has it roots in her childhood. Born and raised in rural Mississippi, she eventually settled in suburban Texas, where, under the roof of a straight-laced step-father, she was a tomboy buffoon prone to rebellion and obsessed with comedy. “I always followed comedy very closely,” she recalls. “As a kid, I loved Saturday Night Live and I Love Lucy. I started watching HBO specials when I was in junior high, and got really into stand-up. I’d always been considered ‘funny’, from as long as I could remember, and at school I was the typical class clown. So, I was obsessed with the idea of being a stand-up comedian, and I used to fantasise about it. But I had no idea how you’d actually do that.”

When Notaro says she was the class clown, she really means it. “I was terrible at school, I hated it. I failed three grades, dropped out of high school,” she admits. “Not only did I not have this comedy career mapped out ahead of me, I had no career-path. I was just always falling into odd jobs, working in coffee shops and offices. I was just bouncing around from thing to thing, working jobs of varying awfulness. One of my worst jobs was when I was 27, maybe – and I actually talk about this in my set – and it was this temp job at a TV commercial production company, where the owner was perhaps the most horrible person I’ve ever met in my life.”

“It’s an unnatural thing, to be standing on stage, having all these people looking at you, sharing your thoughts.”

After dropping out of high school, she headed West, living in Denver, where she managed bands. Eventually she’d end up in Los Angeles, and it was there she’d, finally, do her first-ever comedy performance. Which, in hindsight, could’ve been her last. “When I finally did my first-ever stand-up set at an open mic, I was immediately entranced. But, for me, that beginning almost felt like the end,” Notaro offers. “Doing an open mic stand-up set: I’d achieved my dreams! I didn’t have any greater plans beyond that. I wasn’t ambitious at all. I didn’t it take it seriously at all. I didn’t think it was going to go anywhere. I never imagined that I’d become a professional in any way, or respected, or liked, or even known.”
Early on, Notaro was “nervous, shaking, uncomfortable, scatterbrained on stage”, something she eventually learned to control; bringing that awkwardness and discomfort into her act. “So many comedians are never comfortable with themselves, on-stage or off, and you just have to learn how to control that, how to use that,” she says. For a long time, Notaro held onto her lack of careerism, her sense that her ‘career’ was itself kind of a joke. “Even when I started getting paid properly for gigs, and I was on TV, I couldn’t take it seriously.”

Yet, eventually, she laid down a personal gauntlet: “‘Are you just going to brush this off, like you brush off everything in your life? Or are you ready to finally go all-in on something?’” Since then, there’s been no stopping Notaro, come hell, high-water, or cancer; no place, now, more comfortable for the uncomfortable ‘comedian’s comedian’ than on stage. “It’s an unnatural thing, to be standing on stage, having all these people looking at you, sharing your thoughts,” Notaro says. “But once you get enough positive responses from people, it starts to feel right, somehow, that you’re up there.”