The Tig Notaro cancer routine
In August 2012 the internet lit up with buzz around a set of stand-up delivered by a then relatively unknown comic named Tig Notaro. In the thirty-minute routine – less a routine than it was an ordering of her thoughts, with jokes – Notaro described a four-month period that had seen her lose her mother, break up with her long-term girlfriend and contract both pneumonia and a gastric infection that almost killed her. Shortly before the set, she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. The half-hour is raw, powerful, and very, very funny, traversing the sorts of subjects that make even the most experienced of comics seize up – death, grief, cancer – with almost impossible ease.
Tig Notaro is stealing my shtick
I was perhaps more intrigued than most by Notaro’s story because I also do comedy about cancer. I’ve had it twice, so I can. First at 11, second at 22. At 33 I plan on exploding at a party of friends and loved ones, just to really drive the point home. My first, uncharitable, thought upon hearing about Notaro’s set was, ‘She’s stealing my shtick!’, followed by a ten-minute journey into a void made from pure guilt. Cancer doesn’t offer you an escape from pettiness, just a better excuse for it.
Watch the Tig Notaro video referenced in this essay on YouTube.
When I was diagnosed with cancer for a second time in November 2007 I had just performed my third set of stand-up. Unlike Tig Notaro, a veteran of 15 years, by the time she took on this most taboo of topics, I had little idea what I was doing on stage and even less of an idea as to what the underlying mechanics of comedy were.
But when they discovered a 7 cm growth on the top of my right lung, I was confident of only one thing: I wanted to make people laugh about cancer because I could see that laughter offered the clearest path out of what Christopher Hitchens once described as the “land of malady”. Laughter trivializes the serious, and right then, the last thing I wanted was for anybody to take this thing that was happening to me seriously. I wanted laughter to be medicinal.
Laughter is one of our most common forms of communication, if also one of our least understood. This is in part due to the elusive, subjective nature of comedy. People like what they like, and they don’t like what they don’t. You can’t explain to someone why a joke is funny if they haven’t found it instinctively funny. As the legendary humorist E.B. White once said, analyzing comedy is like dissecting a frog – nobody cares what you discover, and it kills the frog.
“With humor, the equation is: tragedy plus time equals comedy. I am just at tragedy right now.”
Tig Notaro
Why can something frightening be funny?
This may be true of jokes themselves – and the people that find them funny – but the question of why we laugh can be explored more clearly. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren developed the benign violation theory, used by the Humor Research Lab. Yes, this is a lab that actually exists. Their theory proposes that something can be funny when it feels wrong or threatening and, at the same time, safe or acceptable. Jokes take something dangerous and make it safe. They provoke a sense of wrongness and then tell us that it’s all going to be OK.
It seems that Mark Twain was on to something when he wrote, “The secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” Comedy permits us to explore the dark aspects of our souls without fear of becoming lost. Through comedy, a chaotic world can be reordered.
There is much power in the act of telling jokes about cancer. I think I realized that tacitly when I’d stand upon the stage, bald from chemotherapy, and encourage people to laugh at my plight. I could see that even in this moment, exposed and vulnerable, it’s still the man with the microphone who dictates the dialogue, who gets to take something and say, “No, this is OK. This is free from fear.”
Who gets to make the joke?
One of cancer’s less acknowledged traumas is the powerlessness that it inflicts upon people living with it. Suddenly your life, so well-ordered and routine, is made dependent upon medical abstractions and arbitrary chance. Certainty vanishes.
The land of malady becomes your unwilling home, a country populated by the awkwardness of friends and the unfettered sympathy of strangers. For some, cancer is a malignant violation, too raw, too uncontrollable to ever be funny.
But for me, it is okay to joke about cancer. How could the patent absurdity of being told your own body is trying to kill you be anything but hilarious?
How could you not want to strip cancer of its ludicrous power and show it for the grand joke that it is?
To laugh together with those you love and tell them that the predator in the bushes is nothing more than a breeze rustling through the leaves.
