Taylor Tomlinson is my favorite working stand-up comedian. She’s a genuinely funny person who excels at crowdwork and spontaneous jokes, but the thing that really appeals to me is her writing. Her jokes are often exquisitely shaped and delivered, often with one word landing in just the right place to completely change the meaning of everything that came before.
So I was excited to read Tomlinson’s new memoir-in-essays, Actually, Nevermind. If you enjoy her comedy, I recommend listening to the audiobook, which she reads herself. But if you’re not already a fan, there’s probably not a lot here that you can’t already find in one of her four Netflix specials.
In general, I found the book to be kind of depressing because Tomlinson is incredibly hard on herself. She continually talks about how unattractive she is, she mocks her weight, and she throws off a few jokes that undermine her intelligence. They’re little asides—all unfounded, as far as I’m concerned—that suggest her internal critic has possessed uncontested control over Tomlinson’s self-image for probably her entire life. After a while, the negativity bummed me out.
And a significant portion of the book is given over to Tomlinson’s story about what happened when she launched a late night game show following Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. It feels as though Tomlinson is doing damage control for a situation that didn’t need defending. She hosted two seasons of the show and then wanted to step down because it wasn’t working for her, but people in her orbit seem to have painted the whole experience as a betrayal of God, Colbert, and country that she must atone for.
If you’re new to Tomlinson, I’d urge you to just watch her comedy specials rather than starting with this book. But if you’re a fan, why wouldn’t you want to spend a few hours with her in your earbuds? I’ll take all I can get.