Lily Tomlin's humor is a victory of the comic spirit in a world closer to [Jonathan] Swift's than to [George] Meredith's, as her … one-woman show, "Appearing Nitely,"… makes clear. Before Tomlin appears onstage, a small female voice, tremulous but clear, seeps out through the house. "I am not afraid of anything," it sings in a nursery-rhyme sing-song, the suggestion being that it has considered the alternative. The world Tomlin sees has much in it to fear: the social condition is chaotic … and all of us are subject to dehumanization….

Tomlin's characters, both the new and the familiar, live in an isolated world, hardly ever rooted in a family or close friendships. The few who are in families invariably have reason for disappointment. (p. 14)

It is possible that Tomlin herself does not find the isolation, the outsider status, so appalling. She has, quite merrily, described herself as being "out of sync with the culture," and while her characters connect with the audience, Tomlin prefers to keep a cool distance. Early in the revue, she inexplicably collapses. After a few moments of silence, still flat on her back, she speaks: "I notice that none of you got up to see what happened," she comments dryly. "Remember, we're all in this alone."

Yes, but the point is that at the moment of shared laughter we're not alone. The victory of Tomlin's comedy is that it acknowledges the heart of darkness, mentions the unmentionable, touches the untouchable, but has its eye on the large vein of humor running through the center. The fearful is the condition of Tomlin's comedy but not its focus.

Nowhere is this clearer than in two of Tomlin's new characters, Tess, the bag lady, and Crystal, the quadriplegic. Tess and Crystal are more explicitly misfits than any of Tomlin's earlier characters…. Tess and Crystal live nowhere, work nowhere, and have no acknowledged friends or relatives. The danger is more that Tomlin will succumb to bathos than that she will fall sway to satire.

But in fact her achievement with these characters is complete. The greater the characters' leaning toward the grotesque, the more generously does Tomlin endow them with a rich and resonant spirit. They have more self-knowledge than most of us, no self-pity, and a shrewd insight into the society—precisely because they don't belong. (pp. 14, 16)

Most significantly, like Lily Tomlin herself, they are conscious and intentional comedians…. Crystal upbraids the audience. "You walkies … Recently, I got a lot of publicity I didn't want from Geraldo Rivera…. Thank God kids don't mean well." And then she's off, telling us how at a recent carnival a kid asked her if she were a ride—then the two of them took off at breakneck speed. The effect is that Tomlin dispenses with our resistence and discomfort and brings us into an almost immediate I-Thou relationship with Crystal, forcing us to see not how we differ from her but what we share with her. At the end when she says, "Hand me my wings, I'm going hanggliding," the audience applauds—as much for itself as for her. Tomlin's comedy has the optimism of Ernest ("I am the captain of my soul") Henley but without the mawkish self-indulgence.

How does Tomlin do it? … In Tomlin's humor about surviving, her comic object and the quality of laughter it solicits differ from most other comedians. Most comedians work by demoting those presumed to be "up a peg."… But Tomlin (unlike anyone except perhaps her close friend, Richard Pryor) most often works by bringing her characters "up a peg," on revealing the humanness of those in whom it had not been so apparent….

Not that Tomlin is never critical. She is. And her talent lies in her sense of balance and restraint. Among her new characters is Rick, her first male character, and a newcomer to the singles-bar scene. In many ways, especially for a feminist such as Tomlin, Rick would be an easy mark for satire, a write-off. He is a walking repository of macho-nalia….

Though Tomlin directly exposes Rick's foibles, she also obliquely reveals his humanity…. By the end, we know that Rick is less crass than ignorant, more lonely than aggressive, not mean, which would provoke our contempt, nor weak, which would warrant our pity. Instead he evokes the more democratic comic laugh.

Whether embracing or chiding, what Tomlin presents are not cartoon characters but almost rounded human beings—with speech patterns, histories, gestures, fantasies, philosophies, and even handwritings….

Classically speaking, the aim of comedy is not just to delight but to instruct….

We are meant to consider ourselves instructed—and I suppose we have been. Lily Tomlin, like all her characters, is a survivor, a metaphysical counterphobe less imperiled for having taken a good, if selective, look at the world and its underbelly. She—and we—have risked bitterness and black humor, but have come through laughing and, like a Salinger character, "with all our faculties intact." (p. 16)