As Woody Allen wrote in Crime and Misdemeanors, comedy is tragedy plus time. If there’s one comedian working today who understands this perfectly, it’s Tig Notaro. Her blunt, patient deadpan delivery, matched by her unforgiving honesty, vividly paint the struggles and hardships in her life in a way only she truly could, never forgetting about the pain but allow herself — and then us — to let the quiet humor buried inside burst out.
Naturally, these are all the same goals directors Kristina Goolsby and Ashley York tenderly and compassionately transition from the stage to the screen with their documentary, the Netflix-distributed Tig. Warmly-handled and winningly sweet, Notaro’s presence never lets her story become saccharine. Her heartbreak is constantly seen and described, and her pain is often felt, but rarely is this ever about tears. It’s about learning to laugh at the misery through any means possible. It’s about the sacrifice one needs to give, and discovering, or sometimes rediscovering, what was missing. Above all, it’s about being human.
Watching Notaro be pummeled with her C-DIFF diagnosis, her mother’s death — the person driving her into comedy and who understood her the most — in two week’s time, and then have her breast cancer reveal come just two months later, you get a vividly clear picture of everything she’s been through and what she’s learned in the process. The thing is, however, when you’re making a movie about someone as publically honest and straightforward as this subject, it’s hard to produce something that’s even more inviting on such a personal level. It’s not impossible, but their work is already far ahead of them.
To Goolsby and York’s credit, however, they persist and give it their all, and their work shouldn’t at all be discouraged. Though Tig may feel like a reiteration of what many fans already knew, their access and Notaro’s contentious availability finds subtle ways to make her story all-the-more harrowing, but also even more meditative. Though we only get mild insights into her early childhood and personal live before the 2012 incidents, York and Goolsby display a fine patience — like Notaro on stage — towards opening up Notaro’s journey, and what she processed as her career skyrocketed but her health deteriorated and her life remained on the tightrope. What Notaro wants is always in focus, but what she needs is something — either medically or emotionally — she finds through the pain and anguish.
What’s most enlightening here is watching Notaro’s complicated transition towards motherhood. These are the moments where Tig truly resonates. Her restrained-but-reflective journey is brought with all the sensitivity the filmmakers have carefully brought before, but through their eye-witness, person-to-person interactions, they capture what’s at once heartwarming, heartbreaking and discernibly realized in these moments. Even more, at times, than in her comedy, it really gets to the core of Notaro as a person: someone battling the wrenching distress shoveled her way but more than willing to make the most of it and wanting to see it come through as something good.
Bolstered by their equally delicate examination of her relationship with fellow comedian Stephanie Allynne — whom Notaro met when they played lovers in Lake Bell’s In a World…, and met just days before discovering her first medical prognosis — as these touching moments fruition further, Tig wholeheartedly becomes stirringly and compelling. It’s sweet in all the right ways, genuinely humane and also refreshingly mature in many other manners too. It’s when the documentary finally sings.
Of course the moments where we hear Notaro’s Live album from her infamous Largo set are the most impressionable. She became an overnight sensation for a reason. Tig needed to communicate something more profound about the comedian than her own work to shine, and these segments are when these ambitions fully blossom. Watching the parallels to her relationship with her recently deceased mother, and seeing how she grows as a person at the same time just as her career follows suit, it’s harmonious and entirely graceful filmmaking.
If viewers are someone completely in the dark about whom Notaro is, this is more than just an elegant, touching introduction. As stated before, what made her an instant sensation was how open and direct the comedian remains — despite how hard things became and how difficult they remain — and her commitment to accelerate this even farther, while still producing something humorous and universal, is simply astounding. Although Notaro’s likely the only person who can really communicate this to a wide audience, Tig more than gives a striking display for this and why she continues becoming a powerhouse in the business today. Through it all, Notaro remains a sensational and lasting force, and thankfully the same can be said for her documentary.