Tig Notaro in her HBO special, “Boyish Girl Interrupted“. Simply surviving what Notaro has is inspirational in and of itself, of course.
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“I feel like people overuse it steal jokes”, Tig said, and Conan agreed referencing the recent Fat Jewish controversy without mentioning names specifically.
But after a particularly rough patch in her personal life-she got extremely sick with a C. difficile infection, her mother died, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer-Notaro gave a landmark performance at the L.A. nightclub Largo that was praised for its naked honesty about all she was going through, even while keeping the audience in stitches. In order to make it happen, though, she had to start all over. “Tragedy + time = comedy”, she told the audience.
Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted premieres August. 22 at 10 p.m. on HBO Canada. “I had so much pressure and attention on me that I kinda didn’t know who I was anymore and I had to reach back into connecting with what I like, what I think is funny, what amuses me”.
Fresh from the July Netflix release of Tig, a documentary chronicling Notaro’s life and career, the longtime comedienne takes the microphone again after touring at venues across the US, from barns to nightclubs, constantly polishing the material she incorporates into the special.
She says, “I thought everyone should see this…” It wasn’t a conscious decision to cobble a set together this way-“there is nothing conscious about anything that I do”-but in doing so she ended up with the hour that best represents her”. Originally Tig had an even more self-aware bit worked out where she’d spend some time acting as though she didn’t know how to start talking about her brush with death, and creating an awkward space of acknowledging that she didn’t know how to get into it. She jettisoned the bit a few weeks before the taping, though, and opted for a more direct path. Although Boyish Girl Interrupted is not as groundbreaking as her previous work, it solidifies Notaro as the headlining comic she has long deserved to be. When she’s miming the response of a TSA agent who had to pat her down after her double mastectomy, Notaro captures the woman’s mounting confusion about whether or not Notaro is actually a woman (Notaro chose not to have reconstructive surgery). She began finding the humor in everything, joking her online dating profile would need to read “serious inquiries only”.
“Maybe it’s just my relentless hopeful, positive way, but I couldn’t imagine that that would not go in that direction”. Three days later, she took the stage for her weekly live show at Largo in Los Angeles and immediately broached the subject. But when I lost everything, essentially, in 2012, it kind of…when you have nothing left to lose it just takes a lot of that away, the holding close and holding tightly to things. It’s our bodies; it’s no big deal.
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“Why did I film my special in Boston?” she quips, standing on a carpet from her mother’s childhood home. “I didn’t know that I came from amusing, weird people until I left”. She performs a set and later finds out that she had a chocolate moustache nobody bothered to warn her about; she pranks her friends; her family lives up to an archaic Southern stereotype the first time they meet her girlfriend.
