The Off-Trend Comedian

Taylor Tomlinson’s old-school act is a hit onstage and on TikTok. And she’s only getting bigger.

- By Kathryn VanArendonk. Photography by Sara Messinger

TAYLOR TOMLINSON CAME TO COMEDY through church. She grew up in an intensely Christian conservative family in Temecula, California—the kind that forbids kids from seeing Harry Potter movies because the Dementors are too close to biblical devils. Taylor was 8 when her mother died, and her faith in the Lord began to wane. At 16, as a bonding activity, her father signed her and himself up for a six-week stand-up-comedy class led by a family-friendly, church-crowd-approved comedian named Nazareth. Taylor barely knew what stand-up was, but it came naturally to her. She told jokes about her family, her body, and how much prettier she thought all her sisters were with a sarcasm that took her teacher aback. “I told her dad, ‘Listen, this young lady has a career,’ ” says Nazareth (whose full name, he insists, is Nazareth). After that first course, she signed up for another one, and by the end of it, Nazareth had asked her to start opening for him—mostly church crowds, some of them numbering in the thousands.

“My goal was to have a Netflix special by the time I was 30,” says Tomlinson, 28, whose second special on the platform,