Taylor Tomlinson at 3Arena review: more personal, more vulnerable but few surprises

Irish Times

8 hours ago

Taylor Tomlinson
3Arena, Dublin
★★★☆☆
Sophie Buddle opens at
Dublin
's
3Arena
with a quirky, self-consciously annoying, and more or less effective set. There are some obligatory vibrator jokes, a vaguely political bit about the American Democrat party being like a guy who talks big but can't get hard. While the material is far from fresh, it does the job: the room is loose, primed and game.
In the break before Taylor Tomlinson takes the stage, a screen invites the audience to text in responses to a list of questions: 'What was your queer awakening?' 'When and how did you come out?' It's a nice device, creating a sense of intimacy and some gentle suspense.
When Tomlinson arrives, the atmosphere shifts. She exudes authority: measured, magnetic, completely in control. Her delivery is pitch-perfect: immaculate pacing, precise modulation, punchlines landing with forensic accuracy. Like all good comics, she commands not just the laughs but the silences between them.
The Save Me tour finds Tomlinson at a pivotal moment in her career. Her two Netflix specials, Quarter-Life Crisis and Look at You, cemented her as a polished, emotionally astute voice of millennial comedy.
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This new show feels like a progression: more personal, more vulnerable. She confronts the death of her mother, reflects on coming out as bisexual in her 30s, and reckons with the rigid Christianity that shaped her early life. As the tour's title implies, that religious upbringing forms the show's thematic spine.
Yet for all its structure and candour, the set never quite breaks open. The religious material might have felt transgressive to someone deeply sheltered, but for anyone living in a secular society, it treads familiar ground.
Tomlinson attempts to mine the comic gap between the cheery iconography of Sunday school and the darker realities of scripture, calling Noah's Ark 'dark as f**k,' and pointing to the latent misogyny embedded in many Biblical stories. It's all true, I guess, but it's also boring. A line like 'If you're using religion to terrify people, f**k you,' lands more like mainstream progressivism than comic provocation.
A similar flatness hangs over the sexual material. 'I could have been licking ice cream when I was swallowing swords,' she quips, comparing cunnilingus to fellatio. The audience laughs, but mildly. Is anyone scandalised by this? Beneath the punchlines are familiar assumptions: that heterosexual sex is structurally unequal, that women are disproportionately impacted, that queerness is liberation. Again, not necessarily untrue, but neither is it revelatory or surprising stuff.
This is the central problem. Comedy, at its best, works by compression and sudden release: a set-up that feints in one direction, then snaps somewhere else. Genuine shock. You laugh because something dislodges. Tomlinson is brilliant at building rhythm, but the surprise rarely comes. The set is warm, sympathetic, beautifully delivered and safe.
It's in the final stretch that something livelier emerges. Tomlinson and Buddle return, seated on a church pew, riffing off the audience's texts. The exchange is loose, quick-witted, delightfully unscripted. You feel their friendship, their sharpness, their spontaneity. For 15 minutes, the room crackles.