Good To Great

Sarah Silverman cohort Tig Notaro comes into her own with stand-up album

By Michael Shashoua / Jester editor-in-chief

Comedian Tig Notaro, best known for her role on “The Sarah Silverman Program,” that late lamented Comedy Central show, has released her first album, “Good One,” on Secretly Canadian, a music label that mostly distributes rock bands rather than comedy.

Notaro’s material echoes that of her colleague, Silverman, in pacing, outlook and tone. She’s definitely got an inventive comic mind. A lot of the pieces are short, excepting two tour-de-force longer pieces that are central to the album, “Taylor Dayne” and “Self Defense/Shark Attack.” The former, in particularly skilled stretching out of a shaggy-dog type story, in the manner that some comedians did with an age-old dirty joke in “The Aristrocrats.”

In this piece, Notaro begins with an unlikely celebrity sighting of the now-obscure 1980s dance music singer. She keeps to the rule of threes in describing repeated encounters with the faded star. It doesn’t even matter what Dayne’s actual personality might be, it’s more around some imagined snideness the character could have toward fans. Notaro has the audience in the palm of her hand as the piece progresses. To say much more would spoil the piece, but it’s definitely the strongest highlight of the album.

A couple of the much shorter pieces on “Good One” also display this same level of craft, namely “Can You Believe It, “No Moleste” and “Little Titties.” “No Moleste” especially imagines a skewed world in a similar fashion to “Taylor Dayne,” in which Spanish “do-not-disturb” hotel placards can ward off all kinds of evil.

“Good One” might not necessarily be an album that inspires repeated listens, but it’s good work and shows what Notaro can do.