The stand-up to late-night host pipeline caught comedian Taylor Tomlinson early last year, when she appeared on CBS viewers’ radar as host of panel game show After Midnight. But before the small screen, Tomlinson ruled the vertical video space with not only consistently cracking crowd work but incredibly personal stand-up that managed to hit both one’s heartstrings and funny bone. With three successful tours/specials plastering her blond curls across most Netflix homepages, Tomlinson rolls into ACL Live this Friday through Saturday, May 30-31, with her newest live work – Save Me.
Moving from television work back to stand-up means entering a different state of mind, as Tomlinson describes. “In stand-up, you’re only responsible for yourself: you say what you think, and that’s it,” she writes over email. “With a show like After Midnight, you’re part of a team. You’re helping make space for your guests to be funny and comfortable, and making sure the whole thing comes together.” However, in new tour Save Me, she manages to blend a little collaboration into the format through the “Crowd Confessions” segment. At the end of each tour show, Tomlinson and her opener take a pew seat and answer questions – and confessions – submitted by audience members based on prompts contained in a pamphlet passed out while they were entering the venue. “It’s a fun, interactive way to connect with the crowd and do a new kind of crowd work,” she explains, “and it gives my openers a little more stage time, too, which I love.”
Crowd work has become a bigger element in modern stand-up culture thanks to its rise in popularity on short-form video apps like TikTok. For Tomlinson, posting her audience interactions came less from a desire for virality than it being “a way to share content from live shows without burning my actual material.” In her opinion, comedy crowds like the clips because it communicates a little exclusivity.
“I think people like crowd work because it feels unique and unrepeatable – they get to say, ‘That happened at our show,’” Tomlinson says. “I don’t build my hour around it, but I like to leave space for it because I genuinely enjoy talking to the audience.”
Going on the road is a necessity for Tomlinson, who says touring makes for tight and funny material. For her, “there’s no substitute for performing in front of different people in different places.” While she’s always enjoyed testing jokes through the country as well as internationally, the expanse of her touring schedule and crowds has grown as her star-meter’s gone up. “Selling more tickets and being able to travel with a team has made touring feel a lot more comfortable,” Tomlinson admits, “and I’m super grateful to the fans who come out to see me live.”
Each of her tours’ material works through totally different subject matter, which means “if you’ve seen my specials, you haven’t seen any of the jokes in Save Me,” she says. Calling this a more personal show than she’s attempted before, Save Me digs into Tomlinson’s history in the church – hence the pew set-dressing – as well as her thoughts on faith overall, whether or not to have kids, and her experience coming out as bisexual.
“My last special was more about dating and career,” she says, “and this one gets into deeper stuff. It’s still a comedy show, obviously, but it reflects everything I’ve been processing over the last couple years.”
Taylor Tomlinson: The Save Me Tour
Friday 30 – Saturday 31, ACL Live at the Moody Theater
acllive.com/event/2025-taylor-tomlinson
This article appears in May 30 • 2025.
