Tig Notaro has been building up to her new comedy special Hello Again for over a decade.
Those of us who have been fans of Notaro’s for a long time will remember when she was first diagnosed with cancer in 2012 and immediately shared the news during a standup set and went into even more detail on her podcast Professor Blastoff.
Throughout the next several years, Notaro discussed her health problems and recovery openly and hilariously. At the same time, she met and started dating a new woman, Stephanie Allynne, whom she met while filming a small role in a movie, and soon, stories of doctor’s visits were interspersed with cute stories of the two falling in love.
Now with Hello Again, those stories are coming full circle, as Notaro hilariously opens up about her now marriage to Allynne, their two kids, and another recent health scare.
“Yeah, it's wild. Stephanie and I, we met on the independent movie called In A World, and we have an ongoing joke where we turn to each other at really awkward or horrifying moments in life and we say, ‘We met on In A World,’ and just kind of bring one another back to the reality of we were both very minor roles in an independent film,” Notaro laughs.
“The fact that we are still together – we've been together 11 years – and whether we're changing a diaper or our flights canceled and we have miserable kids and we're stuck at an airport, we always turn and we say ‘We met on In A World,’” she continues. “But it's incredible. There's been so many things in our careers that have captured our relationship from podcasts to movies, to TV shows.”
Notaro not only talks extensively about her and Allynne’s relationship in her comedy, the two also showed a fictional version of their relationship in the show One Mississippi, which ran for only two seasons, and which Notaro says, “If there was a world that it could have kept going, we would’ve loved it.” Now, Allynne has directed Notaro’s new special.
While Notaro’s personal life is wound up into her work, she still makes sure to be respectful about her family’s privacy.
“When I leave for the night, I have to go do a show. I'll say, ‘All right, I got to go tell everybody stories about you. I gotta go tell jokes about Max and Finn.’ They love it. They're very amused by that,” she says. “I have to say, after getting married and having kids, Stephanie did say one time, not everything should be on the table. I thought, oh yeah, I guess that is true. I'm not just by myself in this world anymore. And so, there's something that I kind of oddly take pride in considering my kids and my family.”
She also mentions that yes, her kids have seen her perform. “They did go see me at a matinee vegan benefit and heckled me, that was unbelievable,” she laughs.
Notaro also knows that by talking so openly about her family, she’s being a role model for other queer women.
“I had people that I admired from afar, whether it was The Indigo Girls or Ellen DeGeneres, or Melissa Etheridge, all these people,” she says. “It is odd to wake up one day and have people telling me that about myself. I enjoy that people are inspired by it, but I also am very quick to also remind people that I am not perfect. My family is not perfect.”
“Then there are people that tell me, ‘You don't have to add that to everything. You don't have to always remind people.’ I'm like, I understand that, but I also feel like I do,” she notes. “I just do want to add that in because Stephanie and I have our rough moments and our rough days, and our kids are pretty close to perfect, but not fully perfect. Life is real for everybody, and it's great and real for us too.”
Tig Notaro: Hello Again is now streaming on Prime Video.