In the handful of years since she broke through in a big way with her Quarter-Life Crisis special on Netflix—and first appeared on this podcast—Taylor Tomlinson has become a bona fide comedy star. The 30-year-old comedian put out two more hours on Netflix, became the host of her own late-night show with CBS’ After Midnight and is currently touring her newest hour nationwide.
Now, in her second sit-down with The Last Laugh podcast, Tomlinson opens up about how fame has impacted her material, why she’s focusing on religion for her Save Me tour, and how After Midnight is starting to look more like a traditional late-night talk show—even though that’s not what she signed up for.
“I had never sold tickets before,” Tomlinson says of her life before Quarter-Life Crisis premiered on Netflix in March of 2020. As of 2023, she was fronting the seventh-highest-grossing comedy tour of the year—and the only female comedian to crack the top 10. “So to finally be selling tickets to people who are coming to see me on purpose, on top of this comedy-wide surge of popularity and interest from people, was just sort of a perfect storm of luck for me,” she adds. “It’s just insane. I feel very, very lucky.”
All of the added attention and scrutiny did make Tomlinson think twice about what exactly she was putting out into the world. “When I was younger, in my early twenties, late teens, everything was material. Burn it all down to become a legend, right?” she jokes. “I did not have any sort of filter or any sort of boundaries. I’m happy that I had the wisdom to not put anything too scathing in Quarter-Life Crisis, but the way I approach doing material now is I’m a lot more thoughtful about what I want to share and what I’m willing to share and who I’m willing to share about.”
“I’m never gonna do material about people I’m in relationships with without running it by them,” Tomlinson continues, saying that applies to family, friends, and potential partners. “You don’t want to be the person that every time they go to dinner with you they’re like, ‘What can I tell Taylor that’s not gonna end up on Netflix?’”
The same theory applies to sharing intimate details about herself on stage. “I’ve really had to sit down and think about it and go, OK, is this worth talking about right now?” she asks herself. “Am I in a place where I want millions of people to know this about me? You just can’t put anything back in the bottle.”
Despite admittedly getting recognized by fans when she is out in public, Tomlinson says she doesn’t “feel particularly famous,” noting that there are “so many people who have no idea who I am.” But “if you’re a comedy fan,” she adds, “you probably know who I am.”
Tomlinson has always made jokes about her very Christian upbringing, but her current show is the first time she has fully focused on religion. And while her past material on the topic has been “angry and resentful,” she has made an effort not to spend her new hour “bashing religion the whole time.”
“I have a lot of religious family members who I love and respect so much and are so supportive of me. And I also have family members that I don’t speak to anymore, because they have used it in a way that I think is very harmful and abusive,” she reveals. “And I just think religion can be so many different things for people. It can be comforting and inspiring and the thing that does make you a better person. And it can also be something that you use to justify your horrific behavior, and you use as a fear tactic to just terrorize other people. So I think it’s actually a very balanced take on religion and Christianity.”
Ultimately, Tomlinson says this new material is the most “forgiving” she’s been able to be about how she was raised. And she’s come a long way from her early years as a teenager performing comedy at her local megachurch.
“When I was that age I think I was just so terrified,” she says now. “I had horrible stage fright and I was just focused on getting myself to get up there the next time. I think I was scared to even have big goals, or dreams, or aspirations for the first few years, because it just felt so far away and unattainable to me.”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
