Lily Tomlin's career, thus far, straddles a decade. It is not a specific, chronological decade like the fifties or sixties, but rather an amorphous period of cultural shifts that began with Laugh-In taking pot shots at the Establishment; paused with Saturday Night inviting Ron Nessen to guest-host a show; and segued into Barry Manilow, who, on his recent TV special (backed up by three black females with upraised fists), performed a medley of his commercial jingles while the prepubescents in the audience stood on their seats and screamed.

In a culture capable of such casually bizarre transitions, it probably is fitting that in 1969 Lily Tomlin was a prime-time Laugh-In regular, but was nonetheless regarded as an underground cult figure, one who received minimal coverage in the Establishment press. (p. 50)

Andre Malraux chose "blood, sex and banality" to describe the "terrible world in which we are living." Television celebrates all three, of course, but it has made the latter a way of life. It makes sense, then, that a performer who was launched on TV has found in banality a whole motherlode of material.

Both [Jane] Wagner and Tomlin have been involved with kitsch for a long time…. Over the years, their perverse attraction to it developed into a hip update on the camp aesthetic, a trash sensibility that may have been rooted in the gay subculture but quickly grew into a kind of cheery democratic decadence. It was a point of view that, even as it took off unmercifully on the mass-produced, the mediocre, the Madison Avenue, was still aware that it too would probably be absorbed by the source of its inspiration. Grafted onto their concept of the righteous outsider who had nothing to lose by telling the truth, this aesthetic went beyond style and gave birth to a hybrid kind of comedy that Jane refers to alternately as "sentire" or "docucomedy."…

Like certain other comedians—Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor—Tomlin often has ignored the current standards of "good taste" to make a comment at the expense of laughs. One of her more disturbing bits used to be a sketch called "War Toys" that ended with a distraught housewife calling to her son: "Leg or no leg, Billy, come inside, supper's on the table."…

Tomlin rubs it in, and in, and in, reminding us of blacks who turned around and started calling us honkies, of gays who think they're hipper and happier than straights, of uppity women and feisty old folks, of people who are gauche or "square and proud of it," of the beleaguered middle class ("I just discovered that bread crumbs cost more than bread") about to be swamped in a sea of consumer goods.

This is not laugh-a-minute stuff. If anything, it's manic-depressive, and therefore all too well attuned to the times. (Wagner has remarked that manic-depressives are the only people in touch with reality.) It is about dignity and survival; and it's Tomlin's way of saying we are all outsiders, and we are all in danger of being co-opted by one part of the culture or another. Tomlin acts as the conscience of her audience; and it is the first time that a woman has performed that function on the stage.

Female performers traditionally have assumed a persona that stoked some male fantasy, an image usually well-removed from their 'real selves.' (p. 52)

Lily Tomlin, however, refuses to cater to the psycho-sexual needs of her audience. One reason may be that comedy, like writing, is not a particularly sexy form of communication; at best, it can be winning. Besides, Tomlin's comedy has always dealt with sex obliquely.

It is not that she refuses to be a woman (in fact, she has developed into a very sensual performer), but rather refuses to give of herself, indulge herself, on some archetypal female level, be it the whore-goddess promises of a pop star or the self-deprecating distortions of a funny lady. Despite the fact that Tomlin has lent her support to numerous feminist causes …, her strength and independence predate feminism; she is not now about to adapt herself, or her material, to fit any sort of 'new woman' ideal. (This disaffiliation can be disconcerting: many women in her Broadway audiences are jolted by her sympathetic portrayal of Rick, a swaggering, crotch-tugging, singles-bar cruiser.)

Tomlin is unique in that her presumed desire to be loved services no fantasy and wears no mask other than those she has chosen as vehicles for her own creativity. She identifies with no cause more closely than her own, which seems to be the vision of some total reality. In Tomlin one senses a center that holds. (pp. 52-3)