Creative upbringing leads Tig Notaro to comedy, acting and dreams for more

After learning a little about her childhood, it isn’t any wonder that comedian Tig Notaro ended up working in a creative field.

While living in Mississippi, Notaro’s mother would often use the outside of the family home as a canvas, painting whatever she saw fit on the walls, including donkeys.

After Notaro’s mother married her stepfather and the family moved to Texas, the walls were no longer adorned with various animals, though Notaro said things were still creative, as her mother’s personality overrode any normalcy her stepfather tried to implement.

Looking back, Notaro said there are a lot of things she appreciated about her free-spirited upbringing but also a lot of things she and her wife, actress Stephanie Allynne, have vowed to do differently in raising their twin sons.

Still, there’s a lot of creativity in the home. Notaro took a lot of art classes as a kid and one of her sons takes extra art classes on the weekends because he loves it so much.

“When I drop him off and pick him up, I’m just like, ‘God, this is so appealing,’ ” Notaro said. “It makes me want to potentially take a class at the studio where he goes. It’s a part of me that I have never taken very seriously at all, but I’m interested in it.”

Those art classes will have to wait, as Notaro is on the road with her “Out of Nowhere” tour, which stops by the Bing Crosby Theater for two shows on Friday.

Along with art, Notaro also dabbled in music growing up, picking up the guitar at age 9. But for all her artistic endeavors, Notaro was most known for making her classmates laugh.

Notaro said her mother was one of her first comedic influences, being much more animated and outrageous than Notaro herself was, but she didn’t think it was in her future to be a professional comedian. She began participating in open mic nights simply because she was such a big fan of standup comedy.

“I was getting a positive response, and then it kept happening, and then I was asked to do shows at real clubs, and it never stopped,” she said. “Maybe after the first year of doing stand up, I thought ‘Maybe I should actually try to pursue this’ because it started to feel like I could get booked at a club or a college, so I followed that. It was probably a year in, I started to believe there was a potential future there.”

Notaro’s material initially centered around observational humor, recounting funny interactions with people or stories about her family. After she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012, Notaro spoke about the diagnosis on stage in a set that was released under the name “Live.”

Notaro later underwent a double mastectomy and went on to perform part of a set at the New York Comedy festival topless. A documentary, called “Tig,” chronicled her diagnosis and relationship with Allynne, then her fiancée.

Though she was used to sharing stories about herself with her audience onstage, things felt different with “Tig,” as the reaction from the audience wasn’t immediate like it is in standup.

“You have no clue for years or months or whatever it is,” Notaro said of audience reactions to a project. “You can watch something, you can have your opinions, you can have other people watch it, and have these isolated ideas and feelings, but standup, it’s so instantaneous. It’s nothing like the other.

“Even scripted TV or film, you have to wait and see how people respond to it. You, of course, have to like it yourself, ideally.”

Notaro’s time onstage has brought her in front of the camera for those scripted TV and film projects, a path she said was unexpected when she began performing but fairly common as one comedian will get their own show and invite other comics to play various roles.

Notaro’s first acting credit came from playing Leigh Roy in an episode of the mockumentary “Dog Bites Man,” which starred Zach Galifianakis and, fun fact, followed the goings on of a news team from Spokane as they cover stories across the country.

She’s appeared in films like “In a World…,” “Instant Family” and “Am I OK?,” which she co-directed with Allynne, and has starred in TV shows like “Transparent,” “One Mississippi,” which she created, wrote, directed and produced, and “Star Trek: Discovery” and “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy.”

Combining her experience being the subject of “Tig” and her work as a producer, Notaro produced “Come See Me in the Good Light,” a documentary that shared poet Andrea Gibson’s diagnosis of ovarian cancer.

“I brought the experience of being the subject of a documentary,” Notaro said. “It’s a lot to let somebody into your life that close, so I had that knowledge of what we were going into.”

The film was released in January 2025 to critical acclaim, including an Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature film. Four years after her diagnosis, Gibson died in July 2025.

After “years of working on becoming healthy after a lot of setbacks with (her) body,” Notaro is bringing comedy back to her day-to-day life, observational humor and family stories. She’s also got acting work, including the upcoming films “The Comeback King” and “Beach Read,” and her “Handsome” podcast with comedians Fortune Feimster and Mae Martin on her plate.

She’s open to exploring more creative avenues, but she also wouldn’t mind time away from the limelight.

“I feel like I’ve gone above and beyond all of my wildest dreams, and also not even my dreams,” she said. “There’s a part of me that’s interested in something as simple as I would love to garden, cook and get better at playing the drums, and I’m not even that great at playing the drums. Those are some things that interest me.”