Tig Notaro says the worst thing available in the flattest voice going and lets the pause do the rest. Handed hard facts to deliver, she is the funniest person in the film; handed a franchise uniform, the writing tends to forget her.
Fi1m perspective
In Instant Family (2018) she stands at the front of a room of nervous would-be foster parents and reads them the statistics: the honeymoon period, the child who tests you to see if you leave, the teenagers nobody picks. Octavia Spencer, beside her, does the warmth. Notaro does none of it. Every grim number arrives in the same level voice, and the couples on the folding chairs shrink a little further with each one. We laughed a great deal in that room, and it took us a while to work out why: she never once asks for the laugh, so it comes as a kind of relief.
That is the stand-up, transplanted. Notaro came to acting sideways, from music promotion in Denver, then open mics in Los Angeles from around 2001, with no training beyond the rooms themselves. Recurring work on The Sarah Silverman Program (2007–2010) came first, then the 2012 album Live that changed the size of her career, then One Mississippi (2015–2017), which she created, wrote and starred in, drawing on her own life. Her method has stayed the same throughout: deadpan, slowly paced, tension built through pauses and understatement, with the absurd let in quietly and the physical comedy kept small. It puzzled some early audiences, and it can still take a scene or two for a viewer meeting her cold to realise that the flatness is the joke.
Films that understand this get a great deal out of her. Sean Anders did in Instant Family, pairing her with Spencer so that the two of them could carry the exposition between them, one patient and one blunt; we came out wishing she had been allowed to run the whole thing. Franchise television has been less sure. As Jett Reno, chief engineer, she has been a recurring presence in Star Trek: Discovery (2019–2024) and has carried on into Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (2026–), a series we liked well enough but in which Holly Hunter and the young ensemble take the attention and Reno does not get much of it. Notaro has said of the character, "I can personally relate because I failed out of school, dropped out, and had a million different jobs," and there is a good, dry, unimpressed engineer in that sentence that the show has not yet given her room to play.
The limit is real. She does one thing, superbly, and a script has to build a space for it rather than hope she will fill a gap. She has also begun co-directing with Stephanie Allynne, which suggests she knows this and would rather make the space herself. Until then, watch Instant Family for the classroom scenes and skip to them if the pratfalls wear you down. And if a film ever gives Tig Notaro a whole room of adults to tell bad news to for ninety minutes, we will be first in.
Biography
Tig Notaro is an American stand-up comedian, writer and actress. Born Mathilde O'Callaghan Notaro on 24 March 1971 in Jackson, Mississippi, she began performing stand-up in Los Angeles after working in music promotion in Denver.
Notaro released comedy albums including Good One (2011) and Live (2012). She created and starred in the series One Mississippi (2015–2017) and has appeared in The Office (2005), Community (2009), Army of the Dead (2021) and The Morning Show (2019). She plays Commander Jett Reno in Star Trek: Discovery (2017) and reprises the role in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (2026).
Notaro married Stephanie Allynne in 2015. The couple have twin sons.
