Introducing: Taylor Tomlinson

TW: brief mentions of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, mental health treatment and therapy, living through the death of a parent, religious trauma and deconstruction, and medicinal cannabis use.

At the beginning of the year, I was getting semi-regular ads on social media for Taylor Tomlinson’s new comedy show, Prodigal Daughter. It made me snort whenever I saw it but because I’ve never really enjoyed stand up comedy – or most comedy, if I’m honest – I would just move on. But then, after seeing it multiple times, I decided to give it a go and as it turns out, it was one of the best decisions I’ve made so far this year…

I was captivated and cracking up for the whole show. I was just finishing it when my Mum got home from work and I just pressed play again; my Mum enjoyed it almost as much as I did and I loved it even more on the second watch.

I immediately watched her third and second (chronologically) specials and loved both of them. I would’ve watched the earliest one too but I decided to save it for a day when I really needed a pick me up; I didn’t want my Taylor Tomlinson experience to be watched and over so quickly (yes, there’s YouTube but I’m referring to the Netflix specials). She’s absolutely hilarious and she’s so good at what she does. I hadn’t really consciously thought of stand up comedy as a skill before but watching the specials back to back, you can see her just getting better and better. She has some truly wild life experiences to draw from, good and bad, and yet she can turn both into very funny stories and jokes. And she’s clearly very, very intelligent because you couldn’t make many of these jokes if you didn’t have the intelligence, first, to understand the topic and, second, to take the idea apart and put it back together in the form of joke that is actually funny; the religious content of Prodigal Daughter comes to mind here in particular because, if you didn’t have a deep, deep understanding of Christianity and at the very least considerable critical thinking skills, you wouldn’t be able to construct these complex, layered jokes and they wouldn’t land the way that these jokes do. It’s easy to just bash religion and while Taylor certainly takes the piss out of many aspects of Christianity, she’s also drawing attention to the hypocrisy and highlighting the nuance and making some incredibly important points: she’s really good at balancing a spectrum of emotions and not punching down and sharing a funny but meaningful experience with her audience. I think that’s one of the main reasons why I enjoy her specials so much. I also love that she looks like she’s enjoying making the jokes as much as the audience is enjoying hearing them and she’s so good at letting a joke land and rest before moving on to the next thing. I don’t know anything about the skills of stand up comedy but her shows are such a clear demonstration of skill.

I love her specials so much that I have had days – and likely will in the future – where I just watch one after another until I’ve watched all four in a row; if I’m having a bad day, they genuinely lift my mood. She makes me laugh and when she’s not making me actively laugh, my Mum has commented that I’m just grinning away, even if I’m just listening and working on something else at the same time. Something that’s really funny to me is how appealing the cadence of Taylor’s speech is to my brain, to the point where I started mirroring her speech patterns until I clocked it and got it in check (although I do still see it slip out when I’m socialising and I’m nervous and I need to feel a bit more confident). I picked up the jokes faster than I’ve ever picked up film or TV dialogue and can repeat whole chunks of the specials verbatim. This is actually a form of stimming, known as echolalia, but it’s not something I’ve experienced so I just thought I didn’t do it. But repeating the jokes that make me laugh with the same cadence as Taylor just makes my brain really happy. It’s so hard to explain the ‘energy’ that triggers happy stimming or the feelings behind happy stimming and but apparently Taylor Tomlinson telling jokes makes me happy stim and I’m happy to just enjoy that without interrogating it. My Mum describes it as “watching with an echo” but she doesn’t mind because she can see how happy it makes me; this description still makes both of us laugh. I don’t have many things that cause me to stim out of pure autistic joy so we’re both just grateful that I let myself be swayed by the ad for Prodigal Daughter.

I think what also endeared her to me as a comedian over the many I’ve been exposed to over the years is how relatable I find the things that she’s making jokes and telling stories about figuring out who you are and what you want in life, clumsily exploring your sexuality, living with depression and anxiety, going through the mental health diagnostic process, experiencing suicidal ideation, going to therapy, coping (or not coping) with the death of a parent and the impact of that… Seeing your experiences reflected back at you and being able to laugh about them, even if they still hurt or are causing you distress, can be so validating and healing. Of course there are topics that I don’t relate to as deeply or at all – including faith deconstruction and online dating and growing up in a very different family set up – but those parts are still enjoyable to watch and the parts that I do relate to I relate to so deeply and the joy I get from them makes each of the shows special in their own way.

It was a few months before I really needed to watch the one special left unwatched, Quarter-Life Crisis, Taylor’s earliest on Netflix. I really enjoyed it but I also found it really fascinating to see how she’s refined her craft from Quarter-Life Crisis in 2020 to Prodigal Daughter in 2026; she was fantastic six years ago but she’s even better now, from the jokes themselves to her facial expressions and physical comedy to the overall arc of the special. I relate to a lot of the content in Quarter-Life Crisis, but this joke will live rent free in my mind for the rest of time. Please watch the video and then I will share the reason why, beyond it just being a funny joke…

Watching this for the first time, my Mum and I watched it together and after this joke, I turned to her, laughed, and said, “That’s so relatable!” It was a joke but there is definitely some truth in it (please bear in mind that all of this was said and taken in good humour; nobody got upset throughout this exchange – just to nip any concern in the bud!) and my Mum laughed, “Yeah, that’s absolutely you.” I almost inhaled my drink because I couldn’t believe she’d put it so bluntly when she’s really not a blunt person; I don’t disagree but I’d expected her to agree while telling me I was being melodramatic so I was a little gobsmacked. I texted the video of this joke to one of my best friends and told him what had just happened with my Mum. He’s basically family at this point and he and my Mum get along really well but I was still expecting him to feign horror and take my side. But no. No, no, no. He texted back with “well, she’s not wrong” and a crying from laughter emoji! I have never made such an indignant noise. I was getting read for filth by the most supportive people in my life! The whole scenario was absolutely hilarious and thinking about it months later still makes me laugh out loud.

Anyway. Back to Taylor Tomlinson and her Netflix specials. I love all of them for different reasons (although there are common, relatable threads that run throughout), beyond them being super fucking funny: I love Quarter-Life Crisis because I find a lot of the stories and experiences and jokes about growing up and trying to make sense of who you are are very relatable; I love Look At You because I deeply, deeply relate to so much of the mental health (and death of a parent) stuff and I think she handles the darker aspects of it really well; I love Have It All because there are so many aspects of growing up and becoming an adult and trying to figure out your shit that are so relatable and funny; and I love Prodigal Daughter because it’s so fucking clever and while I relate less to the religious element, I do relate to the theme of and jokes about trauma and I love the stories about her family and coming out as bisexual. Every special is so relatable in its own way and she’s so funny even if you don’t directly relate to the material; I just find myself connecting to it so much more because I do relate to so much of it. If I had to recommend one, not knowing a person’s experiences, I think I would suggest Have It All: I think it’s maybe the best introduction to Taylor Tomlinson and the easiest of her specials to get into: it’s still relatively recent so she’s very much at the top of her game and of her specials, I think, this one has the most relatable themes…

She just absolutely cracks me up and I think she’s such a great storyteller. I highly, highly recommend checking her out. I would so love to see her live – I think the live experiences of any kind of show are so often even better than the recorded ones – so I can’t wait until she goes on tour again; hopefully she’ll come back to the UK. That would be such a joy. But she does also have a book coming out in September called Actually, Nevermind, which I’m so excited for – she also reads the audiobook, which will no doubt be a blast. So I’m really looking forward to that but, for now, I will be going back to watching her Netflix specials on loop, laughing my head off at jokes I’ve heard a hundred times and repeating all of my favourite parts.