Comedian Tig Notaro will be taking the stage at Rams Head Live this Tuesday on the Baltimore leg of her nationwide Boyish Girl Interrupted Tour. Notaro is a favorite guest on Conan and This American Life, as well as guest starring on a wide variety of shows such as Bob’s Burgers, The Office, and Community.
Notaro said that she has always loved comedy, enjoying comedians Paula Poundstone and Richard Pryor as a kid and watching Joan Rivers hosting The Tonight Show with her mother. “It was always a fantasy of mine to pursue comedy as a career, but I never in a million years thought it would ever, ever be a possibility,” Notaro said.
But Notaro was able to make her career in comedy a reality, with performances on Comedy Central Presents and The Sarah Silverman Program, as well as her first stand-up album, Good One, in 2011. However, in 2012, Notaro experienced a series of tragic events, including the unexpected death of her mother and her own diagnoses of c-diff and cancer, resulting in a double mastectomy. These events, Notaro said, meant that “my reality as a human being changed.” Reality is incredibly important to Notaro both in comedy and in life, and she felt that “if I did not speak about it on stage that night, it wouldn’t have been authentic.” The infamous set, performed at Largo in Los Angeles, became her sophomore album Live, which comedian Louis C.K. called “masterful.” The album was nominated for a Grammy in 2014.
Luckily, things are looking up for Notaro. She recently finished filming a new series, Knock Knock, It’s Tig Notaro, which will be airing on Showtime in 2015. In the series, Notaro performs at the homes, rooftops, barns, basements, and more of fans across the country. Notaro said, “It is an idea I’ve had for a while, and even did this on the road quite a bit in previous years… Before last year, it was never something that was filmed by a network to air, and being that these shows I previously did were so fun, I thought this could be a great idea for TV.”
Notaro has a lot of other work in the pipeline, what with her upcoming movie with Ryan Phillippe, an appearance on Amazon’s Transparent, and a memoir, slated for publication by Ecco Publishing in 2015. With so many different modes of performance, Notaro has been working hard to keep each of these various balls in the air. “Managing all of this along with a personal life has been a challenge and a massive learning experience for me, but I think I have little by little started to adapt and adjust and learn how to manage it all simultaneously. My biggest fantasy is to just sit at my house and enjoy a day off,” Notaro said.
But Notaro wouldn’t be working on the projects if she weren’t excited about them: “My excitement varies, whether it be telling a funny story or touching on something more personal, or absolute silliness, there is not one topic above others that excites me more. If I’m telling it on stage, I’m excited about it.”
For her current tour, Notaro will be performing entirely new material, never before seen on stage. “In terms of the creative process and building this new hour, I tried to push myself to get on stage as much as possible. I typically do not write out my jokes, I usually just have a few bullet points and ideas of stories I might want to explore, and then I get on stage and start working it out up there. And I record the audio of some shows to listen for what works and what does not. I continue doing this until it starts to feel like the material is starting to come along, and it feels like its really coming along. It actually feels really great and I love doing this new hour of material,” Notaro said.
Laughter is often contagious – when we see others laughing at something we’ve just said, it’s hard not to laugh too. Various comedians have taken different approaches to this issue: some have a hard-won deadpan face that rarely, if ever, cracks; others laugh along just as hard. Notaro says she can only hold out for so long, “then I’m a goner. I love keeping a straight face for a little while and then allowing myself to join in with the fun – it’s the best feeling.”
From Conan to Transparent and Suburgatory, the big screen in Lake Bell’s In a World and, soon, with Ryan Phillippe in Catch Hell, and now to Rams Head Live in Baltimore, Tig Notaro has been cracking audiences up on screens and stages across the country. Baltimoreans will now have the opportunity to experience her signature humor firsthand.
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