Stand-up comedian Tig Notaro was perfectly happy with her little titties and modest career, but the former got cancer and the latter blew up. From Sandra Allen’s new Buzzfeed profile of Notaro, the backstory of her career-changing 31-minute set, “Hello I Have Cancer:”

“The Largo set almost didn’t happen. It was postponed a week because of her health and then nearly canceled. And then the day before it was going to happen, she learned how bad her cancer potentially was. In the prior four months, she’d had pneumonia, nearly died from a digestive infection called C. diff, had a breakup, and her mother had died suddenly after a fall — and now this. As far as she knew, this may have been the last time she’d ever do comedy; she had to do new material, and she couldn’t not talk about what was going on. She was in the shower, mulling over how to possibly to get into it all, whether to go chronologically or what, when she thought, ‘I should just go out and say, ‘I have cancer.’’ She laughed out loud. And because she knew it was funny, that’s what she did.

‘It’s not shocking that one great set led to this explosion,’ Huntsburger says. ‘There are some people in comedy whose name just gets thrown around a lot and for whatever reason their level of success doesn’t match that. This could have happened five years ago.’

A physical, deluxe album version of the Largo set came out in July. It’s called Live — not the adjective, the verb.Though she’s not religious — ‘I don’t believe in anything,’ she says — she’s hardly a nihilist. She loves life. And everything she went through last year seems to have amplified that. This is one of the remarkable things about that set, about Notaro’s comedy in general, yet another thing that sets it apart: It isn’t whiny, self-deprecating, or ironic, bucking current comedy’s contemporary fashion. It’s positive, confident, and earnest — and still funny. Cancer isn’t the only reason the Largo set is so beloved; we really had never heard anything like it before.”