How Off-Trend Comedian Taylor Tomlinson’s Old-School Act Became a Hit on Stage & On TikTok
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Over at Vulture there’s a great essay on how off-trend comedian Taylor Tomlinson unlikely successful act has become a hit phenom on stage and on TikTok.
@taylortomlinsoncomedy #fyp #standupcomedy #comedy ♬ original sound – taylortomlinson
Her stand-up can feel a bit like watching a multi-cam sitcom right at the moment single-cam comedies have become the trend. Comedians like Bo Burnham, Hannah Gadsby, and James Acaster have made it cool to spit the audience’s approval back in its face, to lace performance with screeds against performativity. Specials like Natalie Palamides’s Nate or Drew Michael’s Red Green Blue are deconstructions of the form. Tomlinson’s work, by contrast, is an old-school hour presented by a person happy to be putting on a show, like the coolest youth pastor on the fellowship team. It is the grown version of theater-kid showmanship, full of well-practiced act-outs and written with a tightness that the comedian Whitney Cummings, her friend and collaborator, calls “Catskills precision.” It’s a defiantly traditionalist approach to stand-up, but Tomlinson’s openness about mental health, grief, and sexuality gives her work the weightiness of the current strain of comedy, which values truth and vulnerability.
Tomlinson has the type of face that leads people to underestimate her, to react with surprise when a sharp section about suicidal ideation sneaks in amid material about dating these days. Onstage, her look is aggressively casual yet smoothed to within an inch of its life with her big lashes, bouncy blonde ponytail, skinny jeans, and short, feminine leather jacket. Cummings variously describes her as “cherubic,” “a Mad Men secretary,” “like one of the wives in Cold Mountain,” and “like an actual angel painted on the Sistine Chapel.” When we meet in person, she is sporting a toned-down version of her usual look: the same ponytail and skinny jeans, but adapted for a day wandering around Manhattan in February. She splits her time between Los Angeles and New York, and she is still trying to figure out how to dress here, she tells me. She is still trying to figure out New York, period—we end up wandering the gilded bookcases at the Morgan Library in part out of the touristy impulse to see a real New York place.
Tomlinson jokingly compares herself to Taylor Swift — her extensive material on ex-boyfriends, she suggests, sounds like a Swift set list. In her new special, she compares the Old Testament to a Swift album. “ ‘You don’t believe in me?’ ” she asks, as Swift/God, before cursing humanity with snakes, capping it off with coy Swiftian dance choreography to the line “Look what you made me do.” “I’m a 20-something white woman,” Tomlinson concludes. “Obviously, I’m gonna compare T. Swift to the Lord.” The parallels between Tomlinson and Swift are obvious. They are try-hards, both of them, whose material speaks to 20-somethings living through the trials of young adulthood. Watching Tomlinson gives you the same comfort as a Swift concert or a Broadway show that’s been on for years. This is a professional. This performance will be ultraproduced. You do not need to be anxious.
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