Taylor Tomlinson on Her New Special, Leaving the Church, Late-Night TV

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hortly after her first Netflix special came out in 2020, Taylor Tomlinson had an idea for what to do about God. She’d gone from performing stand-up in churches near her hometown of Temecula, California, at age 16 to bona fide mainstream success by 25. She was selling out comedy shows at top-notch venues, headlining larger theaters. Rights were acquired to make a scripted film about her life. Her success was decidedly secular, and she’d embraced it as such. She’d talked openly about sex. She’d dropped more than one f-bomb. 

These transgressions had gone down famously well, but Tomlinson was still, in some ways, working through the emotional fallout of a conservative-Christian upbringing and a career forged in the parallel universe of the Christian comedy circuit. “My buddy, comedian Dustin Nickerson, and I would talk all the time about how, you know, ‘You could turn the ship around anytime you want. You can go back to churches. He’s like, ‘You call it the Prodigal Daughter tour.’” 

For the past six years, that seed of an idea germinated, as Tomlinson processed — in therapy and otherwise — not just what it means to leave the faith, but also the fallout of having been one of the faithful: the confusion she felt at age eight when her mother died of cancer and adults in the church could only offer pat answers; the internalized guilt and shame cultivated by abstinence culture and growing up secretly queer in the church. Some of this process found its way into ideas for jokes, which she squirreled away, knowing that she wasn’t yet psychologically ready to tell them. Then, slowly, eventually, she realized that she was.

Her fourth Netflix special, Prodigal Daughter, filmed at the Fountain Street Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and premiering Feb. 24, brings Tomlinson back to church, literally and thematically. The humor isn’t rooted in poking fun at Christianity — though her riffs on biblical tales like Noah’s Ark and Job’s persecution certainly highlight their extremism to comic effect; it’s rooted instead in Tomlinson’s evolved take on facing her own religious trauma. For her, the show is proof of how far she’s come, not just as a comedian but also as a former Christian, a self-professed agnostic, someone whose past is processed enough that she can face it with hilarity. “What I love about this special is I feel like it is kind of me in my final form, and that is not something I have ever felt,” she tells Rolling Stone by Zoom from California, wearing a gray sweatshirt and a mussed blond bob. “It is so different from how I felt in my first special, where the whole thesis is [that] I am unformed, I don’t know who I am, I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know what I’m doing. I wanted to talk about religion and my experience with it for a long time. This special, I feel, knows what it is and knows what it wants to say.”

You started doing comedy because you took a stand-up class with your dad when you were 16. Can you tell me about that?
There was a woman at our church who was a retired schoolteacher, and she did a lot of public speaking, and I don’t know how she found it, but she was like, “Hey, I’m gonna go take this stand-up comedy class from this church comedian. You should take it.” And so we did. I don’t think I initially even wanted to. I was like, “I have homework. I don’t have time for that. You guys said I had to get straight A’s.” But we went, and it was me, my dad, this woman from our church and, like, three other middle-aged guys. The teacher basically just gave us tips from [Eighties stand-up comedian] Judy Carter’s comedy bible. We would try jokes in front of each other every week, give each other notes.

Is your dad funny?
My whole family is really funny. I have three younger siblings, and they’re all hilarious. They did drama in high school, but none of them are performers now, and I’m like, “Such a waste!” They’re like, “We’re fine. We don’t need as much validation as you do.”

When you took the class, was the teacher like, “Holy shit, this 16-year-old kid is amazing”?
Honestly, kind of. He was really supportive and had me open for him a lot, and recommended me to churches that I think came to him wanting to book him but he wasn’t available, or he was out of their price range or something. He definitely encouraged me a lot, because it’s not like we knew anybody in show business. There was nobody in my life who did anything remotely close to Hollywood or performing, so I don’t know how I would have continued. I mean, I wouldn’t have known where to go before I turned 18, because I had two years until I could go up in clubs or anywhere with alcohol. Between 18 and 21, I used to stand outside the La Jolla Comedy Store, and they’d let me walk in, go onstage, do eight minutes, and then I’d have to walk back out.

You’d be escorted out of the building?
Literally, yeah. I couldn’t be inside. They were like, you can [only] be onstage. There was a bench outside, and I would sit outside with Matt, the door guy, and he would tell me when I could go in. I had to go right onstage and then walk out.

Were you better than your dad?
I don’t even remember. I don’t really remember what his jokes were about. I assume they were about raising kids and stuff. [My act] was a lot of me talking about feeling like I was ugly and just being very matter-of-fact about it, which must have made people very uncomfortable. And then I had jokes about, like, not going to prom.

So you were taking your teenage traumas and spinning them into gold from the jump?
It was more insecurity. I don’t think you can talk about trauma in a funny way before you’ve matured enough as a performer to do so effectively. I mean, there are a lot of jokes in Prodigal Daughter that I wrote years ago that I just didn’t have the maturity to tell yet. I don’t know if it was that I wasn’t comfortable enough onstage or just how I carried myself, but there have been jokes that I wrote that I really liked, that I held onto because I [thought], “It will work better when I’m older.”

Jokes are kind of like outfits: They have to be age-appropriate and make sense for how people see you. That’s one of the things I like so much about stand-up: If you’re going to talk about yourself onstage, you really do find out how people perceive you based on what they will and won’t laugh at. If what you’re saying doesn’t match what you look like, [the joke won’t work]. It’s why I don’t know how to tell jokes about things that I don’t believe in, because, to me, what I like best about stand-up is the honesty of it. Audiences are smart. They can see through you if you’re not being accurate or honest.

Prodigal Daughter is really funny but also brutally honest about your experience growing up in a very religious family. In the California town where you were raised, was it normal to be as Christian as your family was? Were you all considered kind of weird for being so devout?
No, I don’t think so. It was like, everyone’s Christian here. It was just kind of the default. I grew up so sheltered that when I finally started doing stand-up in clubs — which wasn’t until I was 18, when I was allowed to go into them — that was when I was finally around people who were like, “I’m an atheist. And not only am I an atheist, I’ve never believed in God at all.” I was just exposed to so many more different types of people and perspectives and belief systems and lack thereof, and it really opened my eyes and made me realize, “Oh, I don’t have to be a Christian.” As dumb as that sounds. I was like, “Oh, there’s other options.” 

I had just always been taught growing up that everybody has that little voice in the back of their head saying, “I’m God. Here’s what you’re supposed to do. Believe in me, accept me,” and some people were just not listening to it. And then you get older and you meet people who didn’t grow up with religion, and they’re like, “What are you talking about? What little voice?”

Like, “You’re hearing voices?”
Exactly. So it just blew my mind — as dumb as it sounds — it really blew my mind that there were people who just had never even thought all that hard about whether or not there was a God or an afterlife. They were just living life and trying to be good people. And I was like, “Oh, my God, that’s an option?”

Did you ever have moments growing up when you doubted?
Well, my mom died when I was eight, and the thing that I remember is that everyone was talking about how God had a plan, and her dying was part of that. You know, before somebody dies, everybody’s praying for them, and saying, “God’s going to heal them, because we’re praying for them.” But then if they die, it’s part of God’s plan for them to die. So they kind of switch up pretty fast. That struck me as very strange.

And then everyone was like, “We’re going to see her again! It’s very sad. We all miss her, but we’re all going to see her again in heaven.” And I just never felt like I was going to. I could just never picture heaven. I could picture hell fine. I was like, “I must be going there, because that’s all I can envision for myself.” But that, I think, was the first big crack for me, [when I] went, “Well, I don’t feel the certainty that everyone else seems to feel.” At the time, I didn’t think that that meant, “Oh, this isn’t real.” I just thought it was a reflection of my unworthiness. I was like,” Well, you’re not doing it correctly. You’re not a strong enough believer.”

Did you voice these concerns to anyone?
No, because I was so scared and ashamed, and I thought if I talked about it, then I’m really going to hell. At that point, I’m still hoping for the upgrade!

You said you could envision hell very clearly. What did you envision?
It was just, like, being on fire, being slowly tortured. I could really envision that. It’d be great if I had a cooler answer, like, “Have you been to … Las Vegas?”

What were you like as a kid?
I was a really shy kid. I still feel like a really shy kid. I feel awkward and out of my depth in most social situations. And I think that’s why I like stand-up so much: It is a very controlled way of being social. It’s like, “Well, I’m gonna rehearse what I’m gonna say at this party, anyway. So what job can I do where I have a script that I wrote that I know is going to work based on trial and error, and I never have to see any of these people again if I don’t want to?”

But, yeah, I was a really shy kid. I had a lot of trouble making friends, and I felt really insecure. I was really quiet. I got teased and stuff. I was really tall early on, and I had my period and boobs, and it just sucked. It sucked really hard. But I’m sure it helps or causes you to become a writer when you feel sort of outside of things and like you’re observing everybody, as opposed to participating and being on the inside. You spend a lot of time in your head.

So you weren’t one of those kids who was the class clown?
I was funny to my friends, and my friends’ parents thought I was funny. It meant a lot to me for people to think I was witty.

But by the time I was in high school, I felt pretty invisible. And that’s not in a negative way. I liked it that way. I was in marching band and mock trial and AP classes. Nobody I had a crush on ever had a crush on me back. I mean, I played clarinet for eight years. If you want to be class clown, you have to be OK with your teachers being mad at you. And I was not ever going to be OK with that.

Did you like high school?

No!
Great. We’re all on the same page.

I mean, I did like high school more than middle school. I’ll tell you that.
Middle school is hell on earth. What does hell look like? Middle school forever!

It’s either Vegas or middle school.
Even when I started doing stand-up in high school, I had horrible stage fright. When I moved to L.A., I would go to the Comedy Store to do sets and get physically sick in the bathroom before I went onstage, because I was just so nervous to be around all these comics that I had admired.

As soon as you got onstage, would your stage fright vanish?
Yeah, once I was onstage, even if it was going badly, it still felt better than the fear of it. I just felt like myself onstage. I felt like the version of me that I wanted to be, ultimately, but I wasn’t that person yet in my day-to-day life. And I think over the years, I’ve become that person. I think those two people have become the same person.

I think someone who grew up as religious as you did would have to be pretty self-possessed to tell some of the jokes you tell in Prodigal Daughter.
It was a very slow untangling process for me from Christianity. If you watch jokes that I tell about growing up in church when I’m younger, they’re a lot angrier because I hadn’t dealt with anger and the hurt that I felt, and I needed — with a lot of therapy, etc. — to get to a place where I could talk about it in a way that feels lighter and sillier and not as furious. 

Audiences can tell when you are still struggling with things. That’s the toughest part about talking about traumatic things from your life: Audiences can tell when you’re not healed from it, and it makes people uncomfortable, because then it starts to feel like therapy. If you have done the work, and you have a more bird’s-eye view of the situation, and the audience knows that you’re not on the verge of tears saying it, it works a lot better. To me, that’s the difference between therapy and stand-up.

So one of the benefits of therapy is that the material then becomes available to use?
I mean, what is stand-up, if not just saying what you think about something over and over and over? That’s what therapy is, right?

But by the time you’re able to do the joke, you have to have worked it out in therapy first?
Yeah, I’m figuring out how I feel about something, what I think about something, before I put it onstage.

Let’s go back to the Christian comedy circuit. 
I don’t even know how long church comedy has been a thing, but there are church comics who tour churches like theaters and sell anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 tickets, and their audience will be mainly Christians and people looking for clean entertainment.

You got your start performing that way. Was it hard performing clean?
It wasn’t hard at the time, because I was a kid. I hadn’t had sex, I couldn’t swear, I lived at home.

How did you transition out of being a church comedian?
By that point, I was doing mostly colleges and clubs, and I didn’t want to be a church comedian. When you agree to perform in church, you’re essentially telling them, “I’m also a Christian. I’m not doing my church set and then going to do my dirty club set. This is my set.” And I just was like, “I [don’t] want to feel like I’m lying.”  

Over the years, you’ve revealed some really personal things in your comedy. You’ve talked about being queer. You’ve talked about being bipolar. How do you decide, “OK, this is the time when I’m going to bring this out and make it part of the public discourse”?
Part of it is therapy. And then part of it is if I write a joke that’s good enough. Like, the bipolar stuff, I did not want to talk about it. At first I was like, “I’m not going to talk about this for a really long time, if ever.” I was scared to talk about it. But I started writing about it because that’s how I process things, and once I started doing that, I was ashamed of the fact that I was embarrassed by the diagnosis, because I thought of myself as very open-minded, and I had worked through a lot of judgmental feelings about anxiety and depression, which is what I thought I had. It was hard enough for me to come to terms with that and accept that I needed to get on medication of some kind. It had taken so long to get to that place. Then to get another big, scary label? 

I [don’t] judge anyone else for having any sort of mental illness, but when it’s suddenly you, you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t want anyone to know that about me. People are going to jump to conclusions. There’s a stigma surrounding it.” And then I felt embarrassed that I was embarrassed, and I thought, “OK, I need to talk about this onstage. Because if I feel like this — and I’m someone who considers myself very pro-therapy and mental health-conscious — probably a lot of people feel like this. So it’s worth talking about onstage.”

What sort of response did you get when you came out as queer?  
The comments I liked the best were whenever people were like, “I knew it!” 

You know, when you’re really young and you’re in church and you experience feelings like that, you’re like, “This is just an intrusive thought.” High school is when I started having queer feelings in a way that I’m like, “OK, I can’t deny this anymore.” But I was like, “All right, just don’t act on it.” Because that’s what they taught you in church, right? Now there are cool churches who accept queerness and don’t paint it as this horrific sin. But when I was younger, the coolest thing a church would say about it was, “It’s OK if you’re gay, but you just can’t ever act on it.” And so in high school, I was like, “Well, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll just never do anything about it, and then I won’t have to tell anyone, and it’s fine.” I kept it inside for a long time.

Even after you weren’t religious anymore and didn’t have the religious hang ups per se.
Well, yeah. It’s scary to label yourself as anything, ever. I think a lot of bisexual people are like, “Am I queer enough to claim that label?” Or that’s how I felt when I was younger. Like, “Am I clean enough to be a church comic? Am I too clean to be like a club comic?” It’s just more imposter syndrome. And it’s particularly tough when you’re bi. Bisexuals are always being invalidated. If they are in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, people are like, “OK, so you’re not queer anymore.” 

If people who are straight stop dating someone, other people aren’t like, “Oh, so you’re asexual now.” 
Yeah, I think I felt like I had to prove it or something. And, like I said, if you have been untangling yourself from religion and sexual guilt and shame, you have all these hang-ups there. There’s just a lot of self-doubt going on, and a lot of overthinking. But once I was like, “Yeah, I’m queer and bisexual, it’s fine,” nobody gave me any shit about it, really — nobody that I would care about their opinion. 

I just feel really good about who and where I am at this point in my life. I feel like this is the most honest, open version of me. 

Are you worried about what your family is gonna think? Have they seen the material?
A lot of them have. My uncle who’s a pastor — and who I talk about in the special — and my aunt and my cousins, they’ve all seen it. They came to multiple shows on tour, which meant a lot to me. They are really great examples of Christianity done right. They are loving and nonjudgmental and progressive. Not every Christian voted for Trump, you know? Those are the loud ones, the scary Christian nationalist people, where you’re like, “Fuck off, man.” But there are lots of people like my extended family who believe in God and actually read what Jesus said and who use religion correctly.

I assume that people have had cathartic reactions to other shows you’ve done, but this one may really help people process some trauma.
I hope so. I mean, I fucking love talking to other formerly religious kids. I love talking about deconstructing faith and purity culture and abstinence and all that. That was something I had a lot of anger about in my twenties, because I felt like it had really fucked me up.

Do you feel like you are also reprocessing it as you’re doing the show?
The coolest thing about this hour is I’m talking about how I started in churches and this weird origin story that other people don’t have. When I was younger, I was really embarrassed by it. I was like, “This is not a cool story.” And in writing this hour, I had to address it and [decide], “What do I really feel about it?” I have so much distance from it now that I can see it clearly for what it was, which is honestly a weird, cool, funny way to start a career — and in a lot of ways, probably very beneficial for me as a performer. I learned how to work super clean. I got a lot of stage time in front of huge crowds, really early. I was getting paid. It really taught me how to be a professional and how to show up and do a job.

Outside of your job, what’s going on in your personal life?
Oh, I would love to tell you about my personal life, but I do not have one. I would love to have one. That’s the next thing I think I need to do. And I’ve been saying this for three years, but I think I probably need to take some time off at some point to develop a personal life. I mean, I do my best. I have really good friends, and I’m very close with my siblings, but I don’t have a ton of time to date or learn new hobbies or anything like that. And I would like to be a more well-rounded person instead of just, like, a stand-up comedy gremlin.

You are one of the few women who’s hosted a late-night show — After Midnight, which ran from early 2024 to the summer of 2025 on CBS. Is it true that you left because you wanted to go back to doing stand-up?
I did, yeah. I was on the show shooting four episodes, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then I would fly out either Wednesday night or Thursday morning to go do [comedy] shows on the road all weekend. I would fly back Sunday night and then go to set Monday. I just didn’t have any days off. I didn’t have any time to have any sort of personal life. I was always sick. I just reached a point where I just couldn’t sustain it anymore. 

But I really thought they would replace me. So many comedians would have been amazing hosting that show.

And you weren’t gonna give up stand-up?
No. I can’t. I can’t give it up. Stand-up is the thing. I mean, it sounds so cheesy, but stand-up is my true love. This is the thing I’ve dedicated my life to. Some people do stand-up because they’re trying to get a movie or a TV show. That’s not why I do it. I do TV and press and whatever else so that I can go do more stand-up. Stand-up is the end goal for me. I could do stand-up every day for the rest of my life. If I had six months to live, and people are like, “What would you do?” I’m like, “I would do a lot of stand-up, honestly.”

What is it about stand-up that makes you feel like it’s something you could never give up?
I was so depressed as a teenager, and I felt so lost and scared and sad, and when I found stand-up, it was like a lifeline. I have very romantic feelings about stand-up, because I feel like it saved my life in a lot of ways. And it’s never boring. It’s always interesting. If there is any sort of God, I feel like they put me here to do stand-up.