In September, the night before 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.
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Taylor Tomlinson in Los Angeles, Dec. 30, 2023.
(Chantal Anderson/The New York Times)
“There have been times when I thought I’m only good to people 40 feet away,” said Tomlinson, 30, who grew up in Temecula.
Tomlinson 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 that premiered Feb. 5), 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, last month she took over the late-night TV slot vacated by James Corden on CBS 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 said.
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.
Taylor Tomlinson in Los Angeles on Dec. 30, 2023.
(Chantal Anderson/The New York Times)
Tomlinson began working on her new hour of material 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 said 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 horsem*n of the apocalypse.”
After the split, an uncomfortable thought immediately occurred to her: This will be good for my career, bad for my life.
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 that every one of her emotions “demands a parade.” Onstage, you might say she often leads the marching band, which, incidentally, she performed in at Temecula Valley High School.
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.
Taylor Tomlinson in Los Angeles on Dec. 30, 2023.
(Chantal Anderson/The New York Times)
Raised in a conservative Methodist family, 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 on the role of “surrogate parent.”
When Tomlinson was 16, she and her father enrolled in a comedy class that concluded with a show for an audience of 40 at a hole-in-the-wall church. She got the closing spot. 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 said. “It was like seeing real magic for the first time.”
In Tomlinson’s 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.
In college, she imagined marrying her religious boyfriend, having children and doing stand-up 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.
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 X (formerly 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. They loved when I was clean. And when I did the 15 minutes, they were disappointed.”
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. 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 recently left the restaurant business to work for Taylor, describes it as a game-changer in giving her balance, saying: “I have never seen her happier to be doing something that is social.”
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 stand-up but leaned on it. She said 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.”
Taylor Tomlinson: Tries Out New Ideas
When: 7 and 9:30 p.m. today and Saturday
Where: Mic Drop Comedy, 8876 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., San Diego
Tickets: First three shows are sold out. Final show at 7 p.m. Saturday is $40
Online: micdropcomedy.com/shows/252298
Zinoman writes for The New York Times.
