Even if you meet Tig Notaro, you probably won't be in her comedy

Being friends with a comedian is scary. Who knows what trips, slips, or dumb iMessage typos are going to be immortalized forever on stage? If you meet a comic as seasoned as Tig Notaro, however, you probably don’t have to worry about embarrassing gaffes. Bluntly, you’re not actually as interesting as you think you are.

“Sometimes, I’m at a dinner or with friends or strangers, and people will say, ‘Oh gosh I’d better be careful or I’m gonna end up in your routine,’ and it’s like—likely not. I’m not just walking around going, ‘What are they gonna do? What are they gonna say? I need material!’” Notaro said in a recent interview with The A.V. Club. “I just go about my life and I feel like that extra sense is engaged when something happens… That’s about the extent of my writing. I just take that word on stage with me and riff and write live in front of an audience.”

Notaro has a new special on Prime Video titled Hello Again (we won’t spoil the punchline behind the name, but it’s a good one), in which she again dips into the patented brand of deadpan, self-effacing humor that has defined her past work like Boyish Girl Interrupted (2015) and Happy To Be Here (2018), but this time, with an extra musical (or… not so musical) twist at the end. But even though you might not see yourself in the routine even if you met the comedian at a bar in 2019, no one has been absolutely off limits until she welcomed her now seven-year-old sons into the world.

“When Stephanie (Allynne, Notaro’s wife and the director of Hello Again) and I had our two boys, I mentioned something and she was like, ‘I don’t know if that’s a great idea to talk about on stage because there are other people that you might want to consider,’” Notaro said in the interview. “I had never really considered anyone before because my family—my parents, my brother, and everybody—were like, ‘Yeah, go for it. I don’t care what you say about me.’ I guess having kids is a little different.”

Still, that directive didn’t stop the comedian from mentioning her kids entirely—she did tell The A.V. Club the special was about “just life,” after all—especially in two very funny bits near the beginning of the show in which she talks about one of her sons kicking her out four pages into a bedtime story and the other scaring her when he asked if he had two mommies, only to reveal that he actually wanted three mommies. (“I never imagined it would be our young son who would open up our marriage,” she riffs.)

If you want to watch Notaro in something a little more serious (emphasis on “a little”), you can catch her in season three of The Morning Show. She called the experience “one of the least intimidating sets [she’d] ever been on” due to her friendships with Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Aniston, and the rest of the cast. While she doesn’t know if she’ll be in the show’s fourth season, she said she’d love to: “Jen, Reese, Jon, Billy, Greta, everybody—do what you can, okay?”