Summary
A comedy that will bore to tears, Tig Notaro’s slow outing is best played as a lullaby to induce sleep.
Stand-up comedy is a delicate business, as people’s tastes differ on different levels. Some people like topical humor, others don’t; some prefer deadpan humor, and some don’t. People will view the same comedy differently depending on their likes and dislikes. While that makes the contents of Tig Notaro: Hello Again on Prime Video difficult to objectively judge, some fundamental truths help determine whether the comedy is good.
Jokes should be simple and easy to understand for a mass audience. Delivery should be loud, clear, and reasonably paced. Finally, the contents should be relatable on some level. Hello Again fails at all of these.
Tig Notaro: Hello Again Will Bore You To Tears
It’s said that humor is tragedy plus time, and if that’s true, Tig Notaro’s life has been wonderful and anything but tragic. She mainly keeps to life stories throughout the hour-long special, talking audiences through little vignettes of her experiences. And hardly any of them are comedic.
This points to the first problem with the comedy. If audiences haven’t lived through any of the life experiences that Tig Notaro is describing, it makes it difficult to relate to her, which for me, a young white straight man, is impossible. Other people (not just men) will have difficulty relating too and lose out.
Some of the humor is universally relatable, like a section in the performance where Tig describes mishearing people to a supposedly comedic effect. This is when she runs into the idea that jokes should be simple and easy to understand.
While having a meeting with Reese Witherspoon (not the relatable part), Tig explains she misheard her. OK, that’s relatable. She says she failed to understand that when Witherspoon said Nicole Kidman is 6 feet and Shailene (as in Shailene Woodley) is 5’8, Tig misheard her and responded with how she dated an insecure 6-foot woman with a hunch.
At the time, Witherspoon and the others were bewildered, and that’s more relatable than anything Tig has said. Tig had to explain the joke in the show to her confused audience, and that’s when a joke has gone and is never coming back. Seeing the inside of how a joke works has never made it funnier.
Of course, if a comedian knows their audience, their jokes can match the niche or complexity wavelength people are on, but in stand-up comedy, this isn’t an assumption that can be easily made — doubly so if the show has been recorded for a mass audience on a streaming platform.
The third and final nail in the coffin of Tig’s show is her overly slow, even cautious, delivery. This kneecaps any sense of pace and constant hard-hitting laughs, and by the time she’s reached the payoff of a joke, audiences have forgotten the setup. Comedy is often best delivered at a slightly faster than medium pace, not one where watching at 1.5 times the speed is needed to get to the punchline.
Not all the jokes fall flat on the floor, but none of them will likely send anyone into hysterics like good comedy should. They might chuckle the audience out of the slumber they’ve fallen into, only for them to go right back into it.
Tig’s slow and quiet delivery kills any comedic value left
How a joke is delivered impacts its ability to be funny just as much as the words themselves. Some of the jokes that might have landed have had the wind taken out of them by Tig’s glacially slow delivery. Audiences would be forgiven for forgetting some of the setup. It also makes the show feel unnecessarily long.
This isn’t helped by her quiet voice, enough to let audiences fall asleep. Comedy relies on quick delivery to keep an audience laughing, but Tig’s style does the opposite. It actively disengages the audience and causes them to lose focus. This is the biggest flaw in Tig Notaro: Hello World, but it’s by no means the only one.
