Tig Notaro couldn’t possibly deliver a stand-up act as bold as her last one, right?
How can you get more startling than walking onstage and saying: “Thank you, thanks, I have cancer. Thank you, I have cancer. Really, thank you”?
That 2012 show confronted her breast cancer with unsparing honesty and comedy as intricate as it was raw. Louis C.K. called it one of the greatest sets he had ever seen.
Which made her New York Comedy Festival performance on Thursday night at Town Hall all the more remarkable. After revealing that she had undergone a successful double mastectomy with no reconstructive surgery, she told the crowd that she had thought of doing the show with no shirt, almost daring the audience to make her do it. One more shout from the fans, and she ripped off her shirt with one tug, standing topless, wearing only jeans, in front of hundreds of people.
She had done this before, at a show at the Los Angeles club Largo last month, and on Thursday, her demeanor remained firmly wry. “I’m very aware that people are like: ‘When is she gonna?’ ” she said, referring to putting her clothes on. “I’m not gonna.”
Comedians often show audiences their scars, but never so literally. The point here was not merely to shock, as quickly became clear. In fact, it was to convince us that there is nothing to be shocked about. For the next 30 minutes, Ms. Notaro told jokes so funny and involving that any anxiety or tension in the room disappeared.
It was a set as unusual and funny as the 2012 one (also at Largo), but was even truer to her singular aesthetic. She showed the audience her scars and then, through the force of her showmanship, made you forget that they were there. It was a powerful, even inspiring, statement about survival and recovery, and yet, it had the larky feel of a dare.
Ms. Notaro employed her signature moseying delivery and dry punch lines. But longtime fans noticed an additional defiance on display.
Ms. Notaro became famous for a set that was something of an anomaly in her career, far more confessional and straightforward than her usual work. Before she talked about cancer onstage, her comedy was unsentimental and formally experimental in a way that drew attention to its own artifice. It was more Andy Kaufman than Richard Pryor.
Thursday’s show, part of her “Boyish Girl Interrupted” tour, was a return to form, albeit a little more caustic than usual. It was as if she had set out to prove that cancer (and success) would not soften or compromise her comedy. She alternated between moments of delirious silliness (like getting the crowd to sing “Yellow Submarine” while imagining the scene when Ringo Starr explained to his wife that he had written the song) and a sunny aggressiveness that could even become slightly hostile with the audience.
Even standing onstage half-naked, she offered comedy that kept you at a distance. Her jokes hinged on digressions that appear more chaotic than they really are. A story about trying to cast a man to play Santa Claus in a comedy video had a tricky structure similar to that of one of her classic old bits about repeatedly meeting the singer Taylor Dayne, an increasingly bizarre tale told in such an odd, fragmented manner that you started to distrust it.
