A Clockwork Tig

“We were hunched over, crying, hyperventilating, trying to push each other away from each other … we were laughing so hard we became ugly people,” said Tig Notaro, looking out at an audience largely cloaked in darkness as she recalled a friend’s iPhone recording of a for-hire Santa Claus driving through a McDonald’s parking lot that was, by her estimation, ​“the single most ridiculous video in the history of people alive on this planet.”

There was a quick pause in her trailing voice, and then raucous laughter, some members of the audience bending forward to contain themselves while others concentrated the joviality to their shoulders, bouncing just slightly as they sat. They were starting to get the hang of a routine, and the going — at least for the moment — was very good. 

“He pulls over, he presses play, and … the only thing you see is a boat of a car driving past us, and a man turning, and you hear me, earnestly, yell ​‘Oh my god it’s Santa Claus!’” she continued.

Time was winding forward, and flipping itself, and winding forward again. The audience had, of course, already heard the story in full, told with the same words. But now the perspective was flipped, and the frame had changed.

This — the comical clockwork and deadpan, anecdotal humor on which Notaro has built her career — came to the College Street Music Hall this past Saturday night. There, she performed an almost 90-minute set (or rather, hour-long set and 20-minute awkward standoff with the audience) for a full house. Sharing bits that ranged from swimmers with diarrhea to her stepfather’s sense of graveside bargain shopping in her native Mississippi, she delivered a set that tiptoed, sometimes on uncertain edge, between beautiful, obsessive construction and utter fatigue. 

The good news is that her comical acrobatics are stunning. While constantly, fearlessly flirting with the awkward and cumbersome, Notaro remains a deeply physical comedian, and her set Saturday employed blocking that felt not only integral, but somehow inherent, as if she moonwalked out of the womb onto a stage and began miming at a young age. There was something easy and comfortable about this part of her routine, which included crossing the stage as different personalities, eating an imaginary ice cream cone, bending in mock pain, gently kicking the mic over, and a very cute bit about Ringo Starr’s realization that ​“Yellow Submarine” was, in fact, as good as it was going to get. Her delivery, carefully timed and characterized by a sort of self-conscious realization, dovetailed with it, bringing the show to a sort of carefully organized head.

She is also a master of the callback. Her voice stops and starts on stories with impressive deftness, spacing each of them just enough for the audience to have moved from one joke to the next, ready to be hit by a previous reference. 

The bad is that she’s funny until she’s not. While the show was more remarkably marred by the exceptionally not humorous opening act, Saturday’s feature performance suffered from a witty but ultimately tired routine. Notaro mentioned several times that Sunday would mark the taping of her HBO special. Saturday felt like a practice round, set in, as she said herself, ​“the town that has Yale.” A standoff with the audience at the end of the evening went too long to keep its novelty (Notaro is not entirely to blame for this; she shares it with two outstandingly intoxicated young women in the audience). Comedic attempts to clean up flubs lost their edge after third or fourth callbacks, and the whole evening remained at a low energy level. Basically, it was a good performance, coasting on the expectation that it was going to be amazing.

And here is where the gloves come off, New Haven. The College Street Music Hall isn’t BAM or the Blue Bank Hills Pavilion and it doesn’t aim to be. But I can’t help but feel that Notaro gave a mediocre performance because we are still seen as a mediocre town that sits between New York and Boston. And that rubs me the wrong way.

Or do I just need to find a better sense of humor?