At SXSW 2025, comedian Taylor Tomlinson talked with Variety TV writer Selome Hailu about her double life: host of CBS’s After Midnight from Monday to Wednesday, stand-up on tour from Thursday to Sunday. Then the only woman hosting a late-night show, she talked about learning a new job in public, and why stand-up remains her first love.
A job she never planned
Hosting a show was never on her vision board. When the offer came, she thought she could not do it because she toured every weekend, until she learned the show would film from Monday to Wednesday. Nearly 200 episodes later, she describes it as a cross between Whose Line Is It Anyway? and America’s Funniest Home Videos, built on what went viral that day. She praises the writers, led by Jo Firestone, who invent new games almost daily, and her friend Sophie Buddle, head monologue writer, who receives the TikToks Tomlinson sends her at midnight.
Stephen Colbert, the show’s producer, gave her two pieces of advice that stuck: people will simply be happy to see you when they turn on the television, and you do not have to be great right away. A documentary on the history of late night, in which Jimmy Kimmel admits he hoped to be cancelled his whole first year, reassured her that nobody knows what they are doing at first.
Stand-up first
Taking the job meant scaling back her touring and giving up a planned move to arenas. She made it clear during the hiring process that the show would never be her first love. “Standup is the most important thing to me”: it is the foundation of everything else. After a week of hosting, she jokes, a plane feels like a spa day.
Faith, queerness and the question of children
Tomlinson started stand-up at 16 in churches and stayed a clean comic for five years. Her new hour, Save Me, deals with religion, about which she says she now has a more balanced view while remaining agnostic, with coming out as queer, and with whether to have children. An earlier special dealt with losing a parent young and being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Stand-up, she says, allowed her to become the person she always wanted to be: the anxious teenager with stage fright became, over ten years, the woman on stage.
Her advice to young comics: know your priorities, get as much stage time as you can, and also go to bed. She is now writing a book, a lifelong dream.