Taylor Tomlinson’s Always Armed With the Unexpected

Years ago, I was on a show with Taylor Tomlinson at the Hollywood Laugh Factory. It was a light Tuesday-night crowd — the kind where some comics drop their acts and do crowd work in an attempt to manufacture some energy, riff on new premises they wouldn’t try on a full house, or spend their set expounding on how not enough people are there to watch it. Tomlinson, by contrast, delivered a set with the same polish and enthusiasm you’ll see in the television appearance below, and the crowd responded with the energy of a group twice its size. It was no surprise to me, then, when the 29-year-old comic leap-frogged her peers in January 2024 to become the only woman late-night host on television.

But before that was Tomlinson’s triumphant 2022 Tonight Show set, which serves as a multi-pronged attack on the societal stigma around depression and anxiety. Tomlinson’s meticulous approach to comedy fundamentals earns a raucous response throughout the five-minute performance — an affirmation that the once-scorned practice of seeking help for mental-health issues is now solidly mainstream. She arrives armed with juicy premises but also sweats the details so that the entire piece is a well-polished gem. Watch it now:

This is Tomlinson’s third Fallon set, and her comfort and confidence are clear from the moment she walks onstage. While smiling and relaxed, she takes her time getting to her mark before announcing that, for the last couple of years, “Things got dark.” Other comics play up their alienation when talking about their mental health; they try to make their stage voice match their inner voice to better bring the audience into their world. Maria Bamford, for example, talks about her anxiety in a hesitant, insecure manner, while Stephen Wright delivers his bleak one-liners in a joyless monotone. Tomlinson, on the other hand, wants her audience to see how well adjusted she is after seeking help for her condition. She may suffer from depression and panic attacks, but it’s society’s attitudes toward these things that are crazy.

Next she announces she’s on an antidepressant, which friends warned her beforehand didn’t make them feel like themselves. “Yeah, me neither,” Tomlinson replies at 1:28. “It’s the best!” To someone like Tomlinson, a friend’s complaint is a trivial objection to a medication that allows her to overcome a debilitating condition. Her unabashed happiness with her results earns a cathartic six-second ovation from the audience, many of whom have no doubt had to sit through similar conversations.

At 1:51, we learn that a high-school-age Tomlinson once asked her father for help after suffering panic attacks. But when given a perfect opportunity to make a difference for his terrified daughter, Mr. Tomlinson drops the ball. His absurd advice to eat peanut butter — which Tomlinson delivers in a casual, tossed-off tone — is completely inadequate for the situation. Tomlinson embodies a “conservative dad” desperately holding on to a jar of Jif like a “buoy in the storm.” The fear in his voice and his desperate clinging to the jar make it clear it’s not working. He is as miserable as Tomlinson was with no path to bettering his condition. While reenacting her end of the conversation, she breaks eye contact with the audience, looks down at the stage, allows a slight quiver into her voice, and morphs into a frightened young girl — a world away from the woman who is currently killing on her third Fallon set — as she pleads to her father, “I don’t know what to do when I feel like this.”

Tomlinson then reveals the only serious advice her father gave her on the subject. She bugs her eyes out and talks slowly, seeming almost annoyed to have to be a parent. When she describes her father’s suggestion — to hide herself away from other people until she feels normal again — as “advice you’d give a werewolf,” her face shows a flash of seemingly genuine anger. Unlike her dad’s callous rejection, the audience shows Tomlinson they are on her side with a boisterous, five-second applause break. “Just run into the woods until you’re not a monster anymore,” she continues as her father. “Don’t let them see you change — they won’t accept you for what you truly are.”

That Tomlinson is repeating these words from 30 Rock as they are beamed to the entire world serves as a poignant rebuttal, yet this alternately dismissive and horrified attitude toward mental illness was once a majority opinion. Having started comedy in 1998, I can attest that comedians espousing Tomlinson’s father’s point of view used to get the same level of applause his daughter received for denouncing it. Despite the wishes of certain disgruntled, aging comedians, audience attitudes do change, and it’s performers like Tomlinson who change them. Watching this archaic viewpoint torn to shreds on national television must have been highly satisfying to those who have had to push back against it their entire lives.

Tomlinson next describes how, in keeping with current therapeutic thinking, she’s been trying to parent herself. But it’s an overwhelming job, she says, because “I feel like I got pregnant with me in high school, and I was not ready for this responsibility.” She plays out an exasperated moment of her trying to control her toddlerlike inner child: “If I let you watch TikTok on my phone for 40 minutes, will you please stop crying?” A five-second eruption of laughter follows before she launches into a bit about mismatched couples, comparing them to the uneven pairing of chocolate and raisins. As Tomlinson asks Chocolate about their dating decisions at 4:14, the audience seems delighted to leave the heavy topics of mental illness and fatherly failure and follow her on a Gary Gulman–esque digression into fantasyland. But it’s a misdirection — all to set up a callback to the peanut-butter bit. At the end of the set, an amazed Jimmy Fallon exclaims that he didn’t see it coming at all. You can tell by the audience’s complete silence even as Tomlinson mentions peanut butter that they didn’t either, earning her the set’s fourth applause break.

Tomlinson says audience members who hear this bit worry which part of the chocolate-raisin combo they are. At 4:51, she impersonates a woman panicking about this topic, and while the content is silly, for the first time, we hear her portray the sort of emotional spiral that might lead someone to get bangs or beg their father for help. The acting is top-notch: Tomlinson’s eyes widen, her hands shake, and her voice sounds near tears as she contemplates being abandoned by her partner. Judging by the seven-second applause break that follows, she nails it.

The world where Tomlinson’s father’s ignorance was celebrated and reinforced in popular entertainment is gone, and the audience’s laughs here are the proof. While The Tonight Show is no longer the cultural juggernaut it was in Johnny Carson’s era, it is still aimed, as it always was, directly at the American cultural center; if something gets an applause break there, it’s a mainstream opinion. Tomlinson explaining how psychedelic mushrooms allowed her to forgive herself to supportive and sympathetic laughs is officially where we are as a country right now. Anyone trying to steer America back to the attitudes of her father’s time is in for a bumpy ride.

This set is also evidence that the world is better now that people can seek help for mental illness without shame. Had Tomlinson followed her father’s advice and left her own illness untreated, she might have never become a comedian, and thousands of people who suffer from her condition would have never connected with her message of solidarity on national television. They also would have never been given her even more powerful example of the kind of life and accomplishments that become possible when you seek treatment.

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