Tig Notaro On Making Comedy About Her Very Famous Friends

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Emilio Madrid
It’s been more than a decade since Tig Notaro broke through in a big way by walking onto the stand-up stage in Los Angeles and telling her audience, “Hello, I have cancer.” And for better or worse, she has even more medical scares to joke about in her latest special, Hello Again, streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.
In this episode, which marks the five-year anniversary of The Last Laugh, Notaro returns to the podcast to discuss how she manages to keep finding humor in these terrifying life experiences. The comedian also opens up about collaborating with her wife Stephanie Allynne, who directed the new special, getting heckled by her twin boys at a charity event, mining her awkward interactions with celebrity friends for comedy, and a lot more.
“I kind of can’t get over how much I look like Stephen Colbert right now,” Notaro says as she assesses her appearance in the Zoom screen for this special fifth anniversary podcast episode. And, as she explains during our conversation, it’s been nearly that long since she started working out the material that appears in Hello Again.