【Watch Educating Elainia (2006)】

When Tig Notaro first attended the New York Comedy Festival,Watch Educating Elainia (2006) she was on stage, and she was shirtless.

"It was so fun,” Notaro told Mashablein a recent phone interview. “[It] was exhilarating, especially the response from the audience. It’s funny cause people always ask me about one-upping myself and outdoing the last thing I’ve done and do I feel that kind of pressure -- and I don’t.”

Notaro is returning to the festival on Nov. 5th, and she thinks the upcoming Carnegie Hall performance may top (pun intended) 2014.

“I can’t tease anything, because it would reveal the whole thing,” she says when prodded. “It’s something that I’ve been very excited to do...I would say I’ve been planning to do this at some point for the past six months, and then when I got booked at Carnegie Hall I thought ‘Well, that would be the best place to do this.’

“And then it happened to be my return to the New York Comedy Festival and I might be accidentally one-upping myself,” she adds.

Other than that, Notaro keeps mum about the upcoming performance, but she says just thinking about it puts a smile on her face.

“I think I would still just be on a massive high,” she says, imagining Saturday night after the big reveal. “I feel so confident that it’s gonna be a really exciting moment.”

Notaro has been on the standup scene for years, but was unexpectedly thrust into a national spotlight in 2012 when she spoke candidly about her breast cancer diagnosis. The story went viral, and Notaro's already shaken life changed incontrovertibly. Looking back on her 2014 town hall, she marvels at what it meant for body image and stigmas surrounding illness.

“I was so uncomfortable with my body for so long and to get to the place where I would be actually on stage and revealing my scars...there was a statement to it, but I also because I’m a comedian I wanted it to feel silly, which I feel like it did,” Notaro says. “Because I didn’t acknowledge that my shirt was off, and I just talked about borderline hackey material like airplanes and things like that, all the while trying to kind of normalize everything.”

She repeated the bit to thunderous applause in her HBO special Tig Notaro: Boyish Girl Interrupted.

“People always ask if I’m going to do it again or am I finished with that and...I don’t want to ever guess what I’m going to do or limit myself,” she says. “‘I’ll never talk about cancer again, I’ll never take my shirt off again,’ -- there’s a chance that all that stuff will never happen again, but maybe it will. Who knows. I just know that it felt really great to get to the place where I felt that good about myself and could make people laugh and also realize that there’s nothing to be scared of with the human body.”

“I felt pressure when I first started performing after my story went viral,” Notaro recalls. “I felt like ‘Oh my gosh, people are expecting cancer and sadness and tragedy turned into comedy and I’m not in that place anymore and what if I let everyone down?’”

She’s since shaken that pressure and taken advantage of having a wider audience for her standup. Notaro has been called a dark comedian, but it’s an occupational hazard of talking about cancer in the set that skyrocketed her to fame. Carnegie Hall won't dive into the darkness, at least not anymore than everyday life already does.

“I think there’s gonna be a mix of silliness and personal stories and baby mentions and relationship mentions and nonsense,” Notaro says. “I think it’s gonna touch on everything.”

“I think that even though my jokes on stage haven’t always been very dark, it’s not ever been an uncomfortable place for me to make light of dark things in my day-to-day life,” Notaro adds. “That was just the first time that I really brought it into the spotlight or into my performance, because I was smack dab in the middle of hell. So maybe it’s just the practice of how I dealt with things.”

In the past four years, Notaro’s life has changed drastically, and you can hear the disbelief and gratitude in her words. She’s still juggling projects and toying with the idea of another standup special, but when Notaro calls it’s from the side of a pool in Mississippi, taking a well-deserved break with her wife and children.

“Coming through it and luckily living to tell my story in so many different ways, from the movie and book and TV show and standup and touring the world and falling in love and having children -- it’s really been a whirlwind,” she says. “Getting married -- planning a wedding in the middle of it all. But it’s been tremendous. I am thankful for my life and my happiness every single day and I feel lucky to be alive and working and living.”

Notaro will take the stage at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 5. Tickets are available here.