Impassively Outrageous

Comments (0) By Paul M. Davis Wednesday, Sep 28 2011

Like her pals Sarah Silverman and Zach Galifianakis, Tig Notaro drops smoldering comedy bombs through her laconic deadpan. But unlike Silverman’s inflammatory ingénue or Galifianakis’s ingenuous prick, there’s a world-weary knowingness to Notaro’s persona, with suspicious stares and loaded pauses functioning as a shorthand for, “Can you believe this shit?” Notaro has waded through metric tons of figurative shit: Since escaping the music business in the 1990s to pursue a stand-up career, she has made a modest name for herself while many of her peers from the alt-comedy world have become big-screen stars. Notaro has landed a number of higher-profile gigs — Officer Tig on The Sarah Silverman Program, a stint on Last Comic Standing, and a solo half-hour Comedy Central special — but this may be the year that her hard work pays off in a bigger way. She has a pilot for the Logo Network in the pipeline, and she just released her first comedy album, Good One, which collects many of Notaro’s best-loved bits, including her takes on Chas Bono’s sex-change, the “no moleste” signs that hang from the doorknobs of Mexican hotel rooms, and aggravatingly overused phrases. To get the full effect, see Notaro live, where her wry skepticism has a delectably acidic tang.