Taylor Tomlinson's standup can feel like watching a multicam sitcom right at the moment single-cam comedies have become the trend

Vulture

"Comedians like Bo Burnham, Hannah Gadsby, and James Acaster have made it cool to spit the audience’s approval back in its face, to lace performance with screeds against performativity," says Kathryn VanArendonk of Tomlinson's second Netflix special, Look at You. "Specials like Natalie Palamides’s Nate or Drew Michael’s Red Green Blue are deconstructions of the form. Tomlinson’s work, by contrast, is an old-school hour presented by a person happy to be putting on a show, like the coolest youth pastor on the fellowship team. It is the grown version of theater-kid showmanship, full of well-practiced act-outs and written with a tightness that the comedian Whitney Cummings, her friend and collaborator, calls 'Catskills precision.' It’s a defiantly traditionalist approach to stand-up, but Tomlinson’s openness about mental health, grief, and sexuality gives her work the weightiness of the current strain of comedy, which values truth and vulnerability. Tomlinson has the type of face that leads people to underestimate her, to react with surprise when a sharp section about suicidal ideation sneaks in amid material about dating these days. Onstage, her look is aggressively casual yet smoothed to within an inch of its life with her big lashes, bouncy blonde ponytail, skinny jeans, and short, feminine leather jacket."

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• Taylor Tomlinson's gift is making weighty subjects come off as breezy: "This new hour has the confidence to start slowly but build, anchored by three or four superb extended bits," says Jason Zinoman. "Tomlinson has emerged as one of the youngest comics with multiple Netflix hours because of tight joke writing, carefully honed act-outs and a ruthless appetite for laughs. With a quick smile and wide, alert eyes, her comic persona leans into a wholesome, cheerful affect, a Christian upbringing and impeccably basic cultural references (Harry Potter, Taylor Swift). This provides a solid backdrop for incongruously dark swivels, sometimes accompanied by the kind of shimmies Steph Curry does after hitting a shot near half court."
• Tomlinson on why she spends more time discussing mental health in her new special: "It was just what was happening in my life. It wasn’t something I was holding onto necessarily," she says. "The jokes about losing a parent really young… that had been a subject that I had touched on before and didn’t feel I was mature enough as a performer to really get into it and sell it and make it funny. I hadn’t dealt with it enough. A lot of times you talk about something, and you haven’t dealt with it enough to make it funny and people can sense that. But as far as the mental health stuff, that was stuff I was experiencing in real-time and that’s just how I write — coming from a place of what’s actually happening to me. It was just like, 'This is what I’ve got. This is who I am right now.’'"