Netflix’s Tig Notaro Documentary Premieres Today

Brittani’s Team Pick:

Let me start off by reminding you how great Tig Notaro is. She’s great. She’s very good. She’s incredible. She’s just so so so so funny and this was a lot of the reason I was afraid to watch Tig. Because when someone is that funny, you wonder how a serious endeavor like a documentary could do them justice. But this one does. In Tig we see the tragedies that she so eloquently divulged and found the humor in during Live once again. But where the documentary really grabs you is seeing what happens after the events you’ve heard about: her mom dying, the bacterial infection, the end of a relationship, the cancer, ya know…just normal run of the mill stuff. You get to see how Notaro pulls herself up, how her fellow comedians/friends hold her up, how she still has hope, and how she is still figuring out how to make the pain funny. And in between all that, you’re reminded that she really is so incredibly talented.

Tig could be interpreted as a testament to the healing nature of stand-up but I don’t know that it is. I don’t really think these traumas are things someone heals from. You’d just sort of get through them and then turn around and look at them and think, “well that was fucking ridiculous.” And that’s what we see Notaro do. She points at the past and revels in its ludicrousness. Tig is a story about losing love, family, and comedy and then finding them all again in places you never would’ve thought to look because Jesus Christ, you’d never want to. You can stream it on Netflix now and I hope that you will.