The Year From Hell

The night of August 3 last year was Tig Notaro’s toughest ever gig. It may also have been Bill Burr’s. It fell to the latter, a colossus in his own right, to pick up the mic after what Notaro today describes as "a bizarre performance."

She is talking, of course, about the now-legendary set in which she somehow carved laughs from four months of unimaginable bleakness – mpneumonia, a life-threatening intestinal infection, the split from her girlfriend, her mother’s fatal head injury from a simple fall at home and then, just days before the show, her diagnosis of cancer in both breasts.

Notaro staggered from the wreckage and straight into the spotlight, delivering an ad-hoc confessional that was frank and raw, enthralling mainly for its bravery and novelty, but at times laugh-out-loud funny. Caught between gallows humour and numb, directionless shock, for 30 minutes she marvelled at something so brutal it went almost beyond tragedy and into the absurd.

As the resulting live album shows, the crowd at LA’s Largo were in ruins by the end, exhausted by their own panicked laughter, bellows of encouragement and lumps in the throat. And up next, ladies and gentlemen, Bill Burr.

Notaro recalls: “As I was walking off stage and he was walking on, he had already pressed record on his phone to record his set when we passed each other and shook hands. He has the audio of him saying ‘How am I going to follow that?!’”

Over the past year, she’s had to ask herself much the same question. Where next after such a departure from her wry, unemotional approach? But what’s surprising is that, in finding an answer, she’s struck an unprecedented purple patch.

“I was fearful that my career was going to end,” she says, speaking from New Orleans in a rare moment of downtime. “I was scared my life was going to end, and I thought that my work possibilities were going to be minimal to none. And then the polar opposite happened.”

Prior to those four months, Notaro’s professional life had been in pretty good shape. But far from going off track, she recovered from a double mastectomy, picking up where she had left off and then some.

That night in August sparked a frenzy of press attention and would later become her second CD. But quite apart from that, she ploughed on with writing sketches for her friend Amy Schumer’s Comedy Central series, she immersed herself in her chart-topping podcast, Professor Blastoff, and recently toured it with co-hosts David Huntsberger and Kyle Dunnigan. That’s not to mention the late-night talk show segments, the forthcoming feature films, the documentary, the book deal...

“I get bored and I want to keep moving,” she explains. “The cancer diagnosis was the fifth thing in four months that broke my back, but it also propelled me.” Now, aged 42 and into her 16th year in comedy, she still has that momentum behind her.

Next on the agenda is her Edinburgh run, a UK debut spread across ten nights that have long been circled in the comedy nerd calendar. Most of those planning to catch Boyish-Girl Interrupted will have discovered Notaro in the wake of her personal hell; she refers to this demographic, alongside fans of her first album or TV work, as "people who know me from cancer."

Her latest record, Live (as in ‘to live’), finds that pivotal moment of crisis and catharsis frozen onto a special edition picture disc. And while it has stoked interest on this side of the Atlantic, it bears little resemblance to the routines with which she made her name. Its relative urgency belies her leisurely pace and the nonchalance with which she teases out anecdotes through painstaking repetition — a droll stage manner that has attracted comparisons to fellow American and past Fringe import Todd Barry. Yet despite initial worries over this disparity, these days Notaro says she’s comfortable with Live being an entry point to her work.

“I was concerned that the audience would want a more grounded, truth-telling night of comedy,” she says, at a time when she is still easing back into standup. “There’s some of that peppered in, but a lot of it is just silliness.”

The more intimate side of Notaro’s comedy might never have left the club in LA, were it not for the encouragement and patronage of an army of allies. Among them were standup deity Louis CK, who persuaded her to let him distribute the recording via his website, and National Public Radio host Ira Glass, who suggested his regular guest take her story to the stage in the first place.

When CK urged her to release Live, she says, “I thought he was out of his mind — there was no way. It was so new and raw. My material in the past I’d worked on for years, honing that to eventually record it for a CD or a late-night show.”

But the gamble yielded a new level of exposure, and reviews that she found surprisingly generous. She reflects: “I feel tremendously lucky. I was so caught up in the eye of the storm, and there were so many people around me that had a little more clarity than I had at that time.” 

Back then it was a matter of ceding control in a time of chaos, of going against her perfectionist instincts for the sake of authenticity. With the dust since settled, though, she is able to look to the future.

“I certainly don’t want to spend my whole life and career talking about cancer or my story,” she says, “but I understand that people have an interest in it. I appreciate that it’s been helpful to people.”

Now she is back in the driving seat, free to take her comedy in whichever direction she sees fit. It’s fair to say Edinburgh will find her at an interesting point in her career: not just back from the brink, but perhaps even at the peak of her powers.