[Lily Tomlin's] cult says she identifies so deeply with her characters she becomes them, but I feel she identifies so deeply with her characters she ignores us. She appears to adopt a persona not so much to bring herself closer as to distance herself from her audience. I've never seen a stage persona so armored, so well defended….

Again and again, Tomlin has been characterized as a chameleon, but if a chameleon were surrounded by mirrors, what color would it take to blend in with its surroundings?

In one of Tomlin's bits, Glenna, "a child of the '60s," is talking about her parents: "I learned all about fascism from my father." Is she making a joke about our parents? Or is she making a joke about Glenna, exposing the banality of someone who can speak so glibly about fascism? Or is she doing both? The layers of possibility, I think, don't indicate complexity as much as confusion. Tomlin doesn't seem sure whether she wants us to identify with her characters or laugh at them. The only thing that's sure is that she wants to stay detached from us.

Tomlin has been widely praised for her "range."… But beneath their superficial differences, [her] characters have a lot in common—and while this may seem to indicate a consistent comic vision, it actually reflects a lack of comic depth.

Nearly all of Tomlin's characters are to some extent emotionally or physically maimed …, and make some effort to come to terms with the way their affliction denies them acceptance…. But what disturbs me is that these maimed characters find some measure of self-worth not through courage or indomitable spirit, but by denying the worth of others—mocking, ridiculing, and exposing them. Little Lily refers scornfully to her illiterate classmates, the quadriplegic puts down the "walkies," and even the Boogie Woman, despite her apparent air of grooving on life, to some degree defines herself by denying humanity to those who don't boogie along with her—a very spiteful subtext. They are all outcasts of one sort or another—linked not so much by their common loneliness as by their common hostility.

Something of psychic if not of dramatic interest is going on here—the outcast has to come to terms with what other people regard as his inferiority and does so by defining his affliction as a sign of superiority. This form of comedy makes the cozy assumption that we share the same hatreds—an attitude I'd find offensive even if I did. This compensatory moral snobbery is a very '50s attitude—interpreting one's alienation from the culture as the sign of one's integrity—and Tomlin's is a very '50s sensibility (modified by the '60s only by the addition of the grotesque—she is a camp Holden Caulfield)….

[Tomlin] doesn't deeply identify with her characters so much as she deeply resents those who've rejected them—and we're asked to love them not because they're lovable but because the people who victimize them are so hateful.

There's more than a lack of warmth here; there's a cold, affectless air …, and I suspect it's this sense of chilly isolation that's made her fans into a cult rather than a following.

Comedy, in Tomlin, is often said to be secondary to characterization, but I find both secondary to stance—that is, they function merely to express the angle at which she relates to the world: obliquely, as if she were looking at us over her shoulder. Her humor has energy without vitality; it's so calculated that she's the least "likable" comic I've ever seen. And her characters, too, lack affection, empathy—they're eccentric without insight, weird with little purpose, and, worst, lonely without pathos. Despite an undercurrent of despair, or perhaps because the despair is so strenuously hinted at without being acknowledged, it's as hard to be sad with Lily as it is to laugh with her—unless you feel, as one of her characters says, "not properly appreciated," unless you feel that the function of laughter is to make a connection with other outcasts by ridiculing your common enemies—comedy as judgment, aiming for our complicity rather than our compassion.

It's this feeling of a sensitive, victimized minority embittered by a vulgar, repressive society that accounts for the Tomlin cult….

If the role of outsider is forced on one by a repressive culture, one often compensates by pretending one has chosen that role, by insisting on it…. Tomlin's opening number is a mockery of her success—she reverses the usual scenario by pretending she always wanted to be a waitress but had to settle for stardom. "I won't let you tell me who I am," she seems to be saying. Indeed, her memories of the '50s and '60s constitute a kind of anti-nostalgia, with nearly every cultural reference, from Zsa-Zsa to vinyl to no-deposit bottles, implying an attempt to keep the purity of the self from being stained by a vulgar society. How lonely her comedy is, but loneliness without feeling is intellectually sentimental. In the end her work is less artistic than arty, making Lily Tomlin the Marcel Marceau of comedy.