In September, the night before the comic Taylor Tomlinson made her Radio City Music Hall debut, she called one of her three siblings in tears, asking: “Why do I feel like it’s not enough?”
This emotional moment had long passed when she strode onstage the next day wearing a stylish black suit, sleeves rolled up, and commanded the cavernous room with an hour of cheerful, intricately woven jokes delivered at a fast clip. One theme was how professional success does not necessarily translate into personal happiness. She killed. The following afternoon, sitting outside at a Manhattan coffee shop near her hotel, Tomlinson described dispassionately how she cried before the career highlight of selling out Radio City. “There have been times when I thought I’m only good to people 40 feet away,” she said.
Tomlinson, 30, who undertook her first theater tour just two years ago, has emerged as one of the most acclaimed, in-demand superstars in comedy, the rare young stand-up with mass appeal in the current fragmented landscape. After two Netflix specials produced in her 20s (and a third premiering next month), she became the only woman to make the top 10 grossing comic tours of 2023. She performed 130 shows, more than anyone else on that list, including Kevin Hart, who topped the list. And to follow that up, she is taking over the late-night TV slot vacated by James Corden on CBS, debuting Jan. 16 as the host of the comedy show “After Midnight.”
I followed Tomlinson for 10 months, tracking the development of her new special, periodically seeing shows and debriefing her afterward. What I saw up close is that spending the year in and out of hotels is isolating, but so is being a rapidly ascendant comic at her level of success. “There sometimes feels like there isn’t anyone my age to talk to,” Tomlinson told me.
“IF YOU WANT to make yourself feel sad, compare your career to Taylor’s,” Dustin Nickerson, her good friend and the opening comic throughout her recent global tour, told me, before comparing her to a five-tool player in baseball who has all the skills to be great. “Watching her this past year has been watching someone become a celebrity.”
The actor and comedian Hannah Einbinder described Tomlinson as “the voice of her, of our generation,” before calling her the Taylor Swift of comedy. “She talks about universal experiences — relationships, love — but in a new way. She’s the most evolved comic out there. She’s for everyone.” Einbinder paused, adding: “It’s hard to be for everyone.”
Tomlinson is too modest (and a die-hard Swiftie) to accept the comparison to the pop star, but it’s a useful one. Just as Swift established herself in country music, Tomlinson, another blond, wholesome-seeming prodigy, began in a conservative niche: the church circuit. Both Taylors are prolific artists whose work resonates with broad swaths of people through personal stories, sometimes about ex-boyfriends
Tomlinson began working on her new hour focusing on comedy about being single after many years of serial monogamy. Then she started seeing someone, so she incorporated him until they broke up, which she told me was inevitable because she was working on new material and Swift was putting out an album. “All the signs were there,” she joked. “Those are my horsemen of the apocalypse.”
After the split, an uncomfortable thought immediately occurred to her: This will be good for my career, bad for my life.
Around the time of the Radio City performance, she was interviewing for “After Midnight,” a show built on a rotating cast of comics joking about memes or viral stories. She got the job in November, becoming one of the few comedians hosting a nightly show on network television, the kind of plum gig that has long been a Holy Grail for entertainers. Yet when the show’s producers asked her in an interview why she wanted the job, Tomlinson said she responded: “I’m kind of lonely.”
She has been open in her comedy about mental health issues, including a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and she has a joke where she says every one of her emotions “demands a parade.” Onstage, you might say she often leads the marching band, which, incidentally, she performed in during high school. Mixing goofy act-outs with punch-line-dense jokes filled with surprising pivots, Tomlinson makes even the heaviest subjects seem spikily funny. Her sets never go long without a laugh.
Offstage, she has a more patient and coolly professional manner, impeccably grateful, remarkably free of kvetching and trash talk. She enjoys analyzing the mechanics of comedy and is at her most expansive there, in the details. But there is a certain haunted quality that periodically emerges, a past hovering over her present, one that she has been excavating in therapy.
“I stopped talking to my father last year,” she said in a club in 2022, then noticed something shift in the crowd: “People get really sad when you say you don’t talk to your parents anymore because they wish they had the balls to do it.”
When I first met her, backstage at a February show in Boston, that bit was gone and she said she missed some of the heavier subject matter she used to include in her set, without being more specific. Some of that would creep back in, on the margins. One funny bit refers to taking a boyfriend to meet her parents as visiting “the scene of the crime.”
Raised in a conservative Methodist family north of San Diego, she has talked about the scars left by her mother’s death from cancer when Tomlinson was 8. It bonded her to her siblings, all of whom remain close. Brinn, two years younger than Taylor, the oldest, told me by phone that Taylor took the role of “surrogate parent.”
Many comics come off as the reckless kid looking for attention, but part of what makes Tomlinson’s comic persona different is that she projects the image of a responsible young adult who can’t help but reveal the insecurities and bubbling emotions beneath. In the weeks before taping her special, she lost her voice, and only a few days before, her doctor told her she had mono. She took a steroid and did the show, brushing aside any possibility of postponing. “A lot of people have pushed through far worse,” she told me not long after. “Maggie Smith had cancer when she filmed ‘Harry Potter.’ Like, I’m fine.”
Her father has lately been a more remote figure in her comedy specials than her mother. He was, however, critical to her stand-up origin story. He not only drove her to a comedy class that got her started on this path. He also took the class with her when she was 16. In the show at the end of the course, with an audience of 40 at a hole-in-the-wall church, she got the closing spot. When asked why her father didn’t, she said matter-of-factly: “’Cause I was better.” Sensing how this might come off, she added: “Look, he can sing and I can’t.”
SINCE SHE WAS YOUNG, Tomlinson has known she wanted to do something creative, be an actor, a writer. But that first show was when, as she described it, the “real me” came out. Her best friend, Courtney Lem, was one of the audience members sitting on folding chairs that day and described the show as a revelation. “She was someone else, not nervous or shy,” Lem told me. “It was like seeing real magic for the first time.”
One of the jokes Tomlinson told eventually made its way into her first late-night set on “Conan.” Its premise was that being abstinent was hard for a religious kid because “every time I miss a period, I’m like, ‘Oh no, I’m carrying the messiah.’”
When her mother died, her father remarried 10 months later. At the time, Tomlinson didn’t think that was too soon, but as she got older, her mind-set shifted. “I’ve said to him as an adult: I wished you waited longer for us. He did not agree with me.”
She described her childhood relationship with her father as rocky but felt on more solid ground after doing stand-up. “When I could do this trick, when I was a good performer, he was interested. And he was impressed. And I was somebody worth paying attention to.”
In her telling, her father was a performer, a singer, who chose having a family and stable career as a teacher over pursuing his dreams. She was on the same path, she said, explaining that her entire family got married between the ages of 18 and 22. That was her plan, too. In college, she imagined marrying her religious boyfriend, having children and doing standup on the side. When her future husband broke up with her, he told her that she should keep doing comedy. It’s a conversation she describes as formative, but not as much as her next boyfriend, a comic, saying she was funny but didn’t work hard enough. “He’s very funny and talented and I have a lot of jokes about him,” she said. “Got a lot of closers out of that guy.”
Her career took off soon after she left school for the college stand-up circuit, which led to a stint on “Last Comic Standing.” At 23, she was booked on “Conan” and received a network development deal. Tensions between her past and future emerged. She lost a church gig over this tweet: “I’m a wild animal in bed, way more afraid of you than you of me.” She eventually quit Twitter and stopped doing church gigs.
Her first exposure on Netflix, a 15-minute set in the 2018 series “The Comedy Lineup,” was a turning point for her career and her relationship with her father and stepmother. “They liked the success but they didn’t like what I was saying,” she said. “They loved when I was clean. And when I did the 15 minutes, they were disappointed.”
Over the past year, she’s examined this part of her life in therapy and locates a lot of her trouble here. “There were times when I felt my self-worth is so tied up in this job and what I could do and why is that?” she said, then added, referring to her father, “A big part of it is I felt it impressed.”
Paradoxically, Tomlinson is an introvert, uncomfortable in groups of people. Dustin Nickerson said she’s the kind of person who wants to get invited to the party but won’t attend. When asked when she’s happiest, he mulled it over before saying: when she is making a connection with one person.
And yet her work has often resonated most when she digs into her own personal mess. She describes herself not as a topical or political comic, but as one who finds humor that other people can relate to by drilling down into her own life. Before putting out her second special, which dealt with mental illness and her mother’s death, she showed it to her friend Lem, who was in town to help her move stuff out of a boyfriend’s place after a breakup. Lem was amazed that she could be so open, asking, “How could you talk about this stuff?” Tomlinson recalled telling her, “I can’t really help it.”
She’s trying to pick her spots more now. She describes her new special as “lighter” than her last one, though it’s vulnerable in subtle ways, like how much it ingratiates or refuses to. She said she had been more sparing about what she reveals in podcasts and interviews. And the late-night show will, she hoped, provide a stabilizing force, a home base, a community where she will once again be a parental figure of sorts. Her sibling Brinn, who just recently left the restaurant business to work for their sister, describes it as a game-changer in giving her balance, saying: “I have never seen her happier to be doing something that is social.”
After she got the late-night show, Tomlinson said she heard from a lot of people, including friends and family. Asked if that included her father, she paused for several long seconds, considering her next move. Then she very politely thanked me for the question but said she would rather not talk about it.
Tomlinson knows she can’t appeal to everyone, but her goal is to appeal to as many people as possible — and that makes her alert to what resonates. For a comic who cares about being relatable, success can be tricky to navigate. What will not change is how she prioritizes stand-up above all else. She agreed to take the late-night job only after being assured she would just need to shoot the show three days a week, allowing her to tour over the weekend.
Ever since watching and studying comics like Kathleen Madigan and Maria Bamford in high school, she has not only connected with standup but leaned on it. She said that she first lost some religious faith when her mother died (“They told me praying would work. That shook me.”) but just as important, she said, was entering stand-up. “I was raised in this environment where if you’re not Christian, you’re probably a bad person because no one’s holding you accountable,” she said. “In clubs, I found a lot of these people are more empathetic and kinder and open-minded than people I’ve been around. Far less judgmental in the stand-up world.”
Even as a late-night host, what Tomlinson sounds most excited about is the community of stand-ups. And she thinks, rightly, that the show will provide a valuable new platform for young comics. She said she wished she was more social earlier in her career. When asked if Taylor Swift’s trajectory holds any lessons, she pointed to how the musician had evolved but didn’t completely reinvent herself and cited the musician’s Eras Tour charting her different phases: “She’s still her but saying, ‘This is the place I am at right now.’”
You could say that Tomlinson is now entering her late-night era. She said that when she was younger, she used to dream of being a legend; she talked about that with Lem, her friend. They saw Swift in concert together last year in Los Angeles.
A few eras into the show, Tomlinson said, she turned to Lem and said, “I changed my mind. I want to be a legend.” Tomlinson cracked up reflecting on this moment, then added: “Two eras later, I was like: ‘Looks too hard. Think of the amount of stalkers.’”
Source: Television - nytimes.com
