How Tig Notaro created a cartoon standup special about life, death and Dolly Parton

Tig Notaro knew just how to conclude her newest comedy special. She would show viewers a road trip gone tragically bad. There was a crucial step to create the scene, though: She would need the cooperation of Dolly Parton.

“I was a little nervous because she’s such a perfect human being that I was scared she would be like, ‘I don’t know if I want to be part of this bloody mess,’ “Notaro says by phone about using the singer’s likeness and her self-pity-spun-into-bliss ‘70s tune, “Two Doors Down.” But because Team Parton signed off, “I now think they’re even cooler than I ever did - and that’s hard to top.”

Then again, who doesn’t want to work with Notaro right now? She hasn’t stepped on a standup stage in a year and a half because of the pandemic, yet her career grows only more multifaceted: The L.A.-based comedian and actor recently flew to Toronto to shoot for her series “Star Trek: Discovery”; she’s traveled to New York to judge film festivals; she made her action-hero feature debut in a new Zack Snyder film; and she keeps two freshly launched podcasts going strong (when not co-parenting young twin sons).

And Saturday, she’ll make her debut as a fully animated comedian. Her hour-long cartoon standup special “Tig Notaro: Drawn” comes to HBO and HBO Max as an experimental mix of observational humor, offbeat visions about pop icons and deliciously skewed tales that craft punchlines out of pain.

Not that Notaro, 50, planned her early pandemic schedule this way. When the nation went into lockdown, she stayed close to home. “I just wanted to be very safe - I’ve had some major bumps and setbacks with my health over the past nine years,” says Notaro, including breast cancer, a double mastectomy and a life-threatening intestinal infection. Her brave 2012 “I Have Cancer” standup performance at the L.A.-area club Largo, shortly after receiving her diagnosis, went viral - spotlighting a deadpan honesty that elevated her fame and became entwined with her persona.

For this new special, Notaro’s singular voice also sharpened one of her favorite bits of medical material: “When people say, ‘Where are your boobs now?’ I always say, ‘Probably in a dumpster in an alley in Hollywood somewhere.’ “She didn’t think to include that onstage aside in her suggestions to the special’s director, Greg Franklin, but he discovered it when listening to hours of her live-performance audio. “He loved that so much and wanted to animate this,” Notaro recounts. “I was like: ‘Great, put it in! I love saying that to people.”

Notaro and Franklin, cofounder of the Six Point Harness animation studio, wanted to work together more than a decade ago, but no studio or network was interested in backing their cartoon concept. Three years ago, ready to revive the idea, she asked Thomas Ouellette, an executive producer on the special, to cull through dozens of hours of Largo performance audio to see what could work. And last year, Notaro found herself in a surreal setting, poised to pitch this experiment again.

She says she sold the project to HBO “the day that Hollywood shut down” - in March 2020.

“I remember a very eerie feeling - there weren’t many people there,” she recalls of sitting in the offices of HBO, which had begun sending workers home. “In fact, I was pitching to the network executives on Zoom - I was in the offices and they were on Zoom.”

The scores of artists and animators nimbly worked around the constraints of quarantine life. “It was crazy that we were able to take this audio and animate it - from our phones and home offices - with just everybody locked inside,” Notaro says.

Early on, Notaro also thought that the pandemic could imperil her standup career - a possibility her spouse, writer-actress Stephanie Allynne, initially pooh-poohed. “It took her about a year to realize I wasn’t kidding,” the comic says. (Notaro is still on “high alert” about safety amid the pandemic; she just booked a movie shoot and feels more comfortable with on-set covid-19 protocols right now than touring on the road.)

As Notaro and her collaborators worked on the special, the full meaning of its title was fleshed out. It is “not just that I’m drawn with a pencil,” she says - it also reflects being fatigued and physically drawn. She says they decided to steer toward some of her medical material from several years ago: “I’ve kind of been forced to time and time again find humor in these rough moments.”