Taylor Tomlinson gets ready to launch After Midnight

🎙️ Listen to this episode:

▶ Spreaker  | 
🍎 Apple Podcasts  | 
🎵 Spotify


Full Transcript

Caloroga Shark Media CBS profile Taylor Thomlinson. Now, I live in a world where many things can be concurrently true at once. On the one hand, Taylor Thomlinson is wonderfully funny, super talented, going to be a great host of After Midnight, and a comedian you should pay attention to.

Also, what could be concurrently true is After Midnight airs on CBS, which ki…

If you’re familiar with Tomlinson’s story so far, she retold her for the CBS crowd and said, I grew up super sheltered and very Christian. I didn’t even really know what stand up wasn’t until like middle school. All my jokes have really been rooted in my real life. When I first started, obviously I was very clean. I was sixteen years old, very sheltered.

I mean I hadn’t dated, I had had sex, I hadn’t done much of anything, and so I think the jokes I were doing were probably a pretty observational and be very self deprecating, probably to like a point where it might have been a little sad. Actually, Taylor lost her mother to cancer at the age of eights and says, I started writing jokes about losing my mom when I was much younger, but they were very like hit or miss as far as how often they would work, because I was doing them, you know, on sunset Friday night, and everybody was like, we’re kind of here trying to get laid. As for the new gig, she says, the thing I’m most nervous about is the social aspect of it and how many people I’m going to be interacting with, because that’s a skill. It doesn’t come to me naturally. But again, I feel like I’m in a place now where it’s something that I’m better at and want to continue to keep getting better at, and it’s the thing I’m most nervous about.

Really Enough After Midnight premiere is Tuesday. She also has a new special coming out on Netflix, Taylor Tomlinson’s Haven’t All That’ll be out February thirteenth, Esquire profiled Gary Gulman. Gary had the best special of twenty twenty three. In my opinion, Their mind is that about five years ago Gary turned himself into something of a Twitter comedy guru. On the morning of December thirty, first, twenty eighteen, he was having coffee with his wife and he posed the question, what do you think people do if I offered a comedy tip every day next year.

She liked the idea, so he tweeted out he was going to do it, and then for three hundred and sixty six consecutive days, Gary came up with fresh pieces of advice and every once in a while strong opinions about what not to do as a comedian. The first tip January first, twenty nineteen was record every set the hard part. Listen to it and transcribe everything you want to say. Again, it’s sometimes depressing, but it gets you to do the hardest part, which is to sit down and writes. Usually you’ll think of something to add or change.

This works for me. That is great advice. Gary Goldman. Tip number six is that words with the sound buff uh and cus, especially at the beginning end, or funnier. No one knows why Buick is funnier than Nissan.

I learned this early. I assumed everyone new. They don’t. Kathleen Madigan spoke to Tulsa World and said, my dad didn’t know I was left handed until I was fifty two. That gives you an idea of what I’m talking about.

We were fishing and he’s like, why do you keep doing that? Why do you keep switching hands like that? And I go because it’s a right handed reel, and he goes, you’re left handed, and I’m like, yeah, since the day we met. He says, well, you golf right handed, and I said, because I didn’t want to learn how to golf, and you said, use the clubs in the garage, so I used my brother’s clubs. Kathleen says that her parents didn’t take the comedy thing seriously.

I was only twenty three when I left for the road, maybe twenty two, I don’t really remember. I was like, I’ll give it five years. If it doesn’t work, I’m sure at twenty seven I can regroup. It’s not like I’m forty seven. I’m gonna quit a good job.

I probably made thirty eight grand a year at that magazine, and I still bartended for real money. I made way more money boardtending. As we’re making comedy a career. Kathleen says, like, yes, I probably thought when I was making more than my rent comfortably, I thought, okay, this is good, and I could do the clubs till you know, whenever I’m sixty, and then I could go work at a bar, t’ll sixty five and get on social Security and stuff. I mean, I really looked at it like a job.

A friend always looks at it like it’s art. I’m just too Midwest and too practical for that. I’m like, no, still a job, and you still have to have enough money to make a living. When you’re making two fifty a week as an opening act, that’s not a living, that’s a hobby that brings you beer money. So I think once I got to the point where I had the whole year booked out in front of me, and I knew the money was decent enough for me, I thought, Okay, this is cool.

Thels A World asked Kathleen. Is there an art to picking an opening act? She said, I don’t think there’s an art to it, but there’s a sensibility about it. You have to be practical. There’s one guy I really like, but he’s not right for my audiences.

And the better he gets, the more he’s not right right for them. He can get political and challenging and all that. I pick the good time Charlie’s the ones that are just silly and funny, and I really work hard at picking good openers. I’ve had that discussion with other comedians where they’re like, I don’t care omens, and I’m like, I care because A these people pay and they shouldn’t be forced to sit here and listen to somebody that’s inappropriate or not funny, and b it sets the tone. Pete Holmes got very introspective when speaking to Collider.

Pete said, becoming a parent is a death, and I mean that in a good way. It’s a change, especially for a woman who really goes through that physical transformation. The part of you that’s not a parent goes away, and then the part of you that’s a parent arrives just as suddenly as the other one left, and it’s a transformation. The way that I’ve sort of thought about it is way more interesting. It’s deeply healthy, especially for comedian whose job is to sort of display as wares of personality and his thoughts and his feelings and stuff.

Left unchecked, you could become like a gollum. I thought I was the star of the movie, like most of us do in our youth. It’s a movie about you. It fades in every morning when you wake up, it fades to the credits every night when you go to bed. When you have a baby, you’re like, oh no, I’m a supporting character.

The movie didn’t even start until Lila was born. There’s a line in the movie Interstellar that says, as a parent, it’s your job to become the memories of your child. That is a great line. Pete continued, I don’t mean to disparage anyone else’s comedy, but the comedians that have kids, or that have something outside of themselves, even if it’s not a child, that’s very important consuming for them. I prefer that to jokes about weed and Xbox.

That’s just gonna be a preference I have. In my forties, Samuel spoke to the pitt News and they asked him if he had any memories of Pittsburgh, and sam said, one that definitely sticks out to me is that had a morning show appearance where I really I’ve never ticked off a morning show that much of my life. I was on two hours of sleep and I was in kind of mood. They asked me, so, have you always been funny? And I said, with a straight face, no.

As a young kid, my uncle was funny, and he molested me. Then I was funny. It was like Spider Man. I delivered that line very straight faced. They didn’t know what to do with it.

They kind of froze because it was live TV, and I think he said something like, Okay, I don’t know what to do with that. Tips for up and coming comedians from Sam Morrel Live, try to live and try to have experiences. Write constantly. You need to constantly write and constantly try to get on stage if you want stand up. When I started, there wasn’t TikTok.

At the risk of sounding old as hell, I was sending comedy clubs, VHS’s and DVDs to get booked, which took a long time. Holy crap, I’m not that old, but I guess I am. What it’s say is maybe you’re good on one of those or on TikTok or Instagram, and you’re good at sketches or jokes. The world is there for you to make jokes at if you want to pursue this. I once heard Bill Burr say, be careful posting your first few sets on social media, because do any of us want to see de Niro’s first audition.

It kind of kills the mistique of de Niro. The New York Times spoke to Susi Eddie Azart about her getting into politics. The conversation went here, with his Art saying comedy is not a good political weapon. There are people doing anti trans comedy, maybe because they would have laid into other areas and now they’re feeling it’s a fair game to attack trans people. I don’t know why.

So they asked Eddie about Dave Chappelle. The answer, I don’t want to get into a scrap. I think Dave is very talented, and I’ve met him and when we met and it was great. The Times asked Chapelle said, I’m curious how you understand that material. There are a lot of people doing anti gay men and anti lesbian woman material at the moment, Eddie said, not so much.

I don’t think. Twenty years ago, yeah, before marriage, there was a lot of oh my god, we’ve gone to with a tipping point. When I came out in eighty five, how many discussions, how many jokes were there about being trans? None? Now the discussions are happening.

It’s interesting why some people just say trans not just LGBTQ. Plus it’s quite a wide arena, and they’re just concentrating on one part of it. It’s sad that people feel they want to attack it. Why not attack power groups rather than vulnerable people. Some people like to do that.

You de spare about the little parts of humanity, but most of humanity is good. I knew I was transgender when I was five, and I didn’t tell anyone for a long time. Think of the negative mental health I came out of twenty three, Think of the positive mental health since then. It’s a good thing. Be honest, be open, let’s talk about it.

I didn’t notice that the Times referred to the comedian as Eddie in this one. I believe that she’s going by Susie these days, and I know why I went back and forth there. Her website is eddie azor dot com. So that said, the last time that that website was updated was December of twenty twenty, so I don’t know. Mindy Rickles talked about her dad, Don Rickles legacy with the National Comedy Center.

Mindy says Don was a very loving dad. He never insulted us, and he started something with this insult humor, but it was always done in a way that was kind in his act, he always sang a song I’m a nice guy to show the audience that even though he was insulting them, it was done with warmth and a little bit of kidding in it. He always made a joke keep my name alive, Mindy, So this definitely does that. Meaning the Don Rickles exhibit at the Comedy Center, just to know his memory is alive for my kids and their kids to come and the fans. I mean, I’m so happy for the fans they’ll be able to go and see something like that.

Mindy says there’s a YouTube channel called at Don Rickles featuring some of her dad’s shows. I didn’t know that. That’s cool. And if you can’t be bothered to go to comedy club, what if the comedian comes to you. Howie Wayfish is the founder of House Calls of Comedy.

Customers can hire comedians. They’ll come directly to your home. No occasion is off limits. Comedians will venture out to perform at country clubs, wineries, dispensaries, charity events, holiday parties, birthdays, and small gatherings. How He says, if a client asked, they’ll even do comedy at the foot of someone’s bed.

This will run you between seven hundred and fifty to one thousand dollars, but how he says, I’m always negotiable. We’ll perform wherever the setting is. You can eat your breakfast and we’ll give you some laughs. And that is your comedy news for today. If you enjoy the program, tell a friend about it.

They might like it too. If you want to support the show, go to buy me a coffee. Dot com slash Daily Comedy News, or if you’re in a podcasting two point zero, use the Fountain app and you can throw some sets in my way. See you here tomorrow