Sexy, Side-Splitting New Comedy Special On Netflix Jokes About Love, Religion, And AI

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 58 seconds ago

Netflix has many faults as a streamer, including those constantly increasing subscription prices and the growing library of slop they call original movies. However, one of the streaming platform’s greatest strengths is the sheer amount of stand-up comedy available on the platform. There are comedians for every kind of humor, and Netflix deserves credit for giving many of these artists a bigger stage than they might have otherwise achieved on their own.

One such comedian is Taylor Tomlinson, who already had three absolutely hilarious specials on Netflix. Recently, she debuted her latest special, Taylor Tomlinson: Prodigal Daughter. Directed by the titular funnywoman, this special is a deeply personal exploration of sex, religion, and even AI. The result is the rarest kind of stand-up comedy, one with both laugh-until-you-cry vulgar jokes and poignant reflections that might just change your life.

Sunday Sermon Is Now In Session

In case you skipped Sunday school, Prodigal Daughter is a play on the biblical tale of the prodigal son who runs away, squanders his inheritance, and then gets welcomed back with open arms by his father. In the context of the Bible, this is a parable about how forgiveness is the highest form of love. Of course, Taylor Tomlinson turns this into a gag about being the eldest kid and getting outraged at how much your parents let your younger siblings get away with while expecting you to be absolutely perfect.

That’s a sample of how Tomlinson deftly walks a very tight rope with Prodigal Daughter. Given the name and the fact that she filmed this special in a church, you might think that the show was going to be constantly dunking on Christians for their beliefs. Instead, religion serves as a playful springboard to examine the various quirks and neuroses that make us all human, which unite us just as much as any set of shared beliefs.

From Faith To Fetishes

One of my favorite examples of this is when she discusses how she’s never had the certainty that Christians possess when they say they “just know” that God is real. According to Tomlinson, the only time she had “just known something” was when she had diarrhea. But, as she jokes (in a moment that is all too familiar to all of us), that is an incident that always causes her to pray.

Fittingly enough for a comedy special named after a biblical parable, Prodigal Daughter has a kind of confessional quality to it: Taylor Tomlinson gets quite personal about the ways she sabotages relationships (like asking her boyfriend if he’d want to break up if they found out they were cousins) and her real fear of AI (namely, that she’d be one of the weird odd who falls in love with it. These are the hilarious sins which she confesses to an audience who can only absolve her through their laughter. 

Father, Forgive Me, For I Have Joked

However, the confessional nature of her comedy is secretly an invitation for the audience to extend the same grace and forgiveness to themselves for their own neurotic foibles. That radical forgiveness of ourselves by ourselves is that much easier because Tomlinson’s hilarious gags remind us that we are not alone (and never have been), even in our deepest, most isolating weirdness.

As with her previous specials, Taylor Tomlinson is arguably at her unhinged and hilarious best when joking about sex. There’s a delightfully deranged bit about getting jealous of her robot boyfriend and the dishwasher (“is her rack bigger than mine?”) that I think about at least once a day (especially the raunchy bubbles bit). She also has a gag about what women look at during certain sexual positions that, I dare say, might change how you make love (or at least which videos you leave running on YouTube!).

Can I Get An Amen?

Honestly, it’s tough for me to avoid fanboying too hard over Taylor Tomlinson. I have been a huge fan since her first Netflix special, loved her as the host of After Midnight, and even took the missus to see her last comedy tour. Her Save Me tour directly inspired Prodigal Daughter, so my only real worries going into this special were that the jokes would be familiar or that it would not match the hilarious intensity of the previous special.

Fortunately, my fears were all for naught: from beginning to end, Prodigal Daughter is filled with the same self-effacing, trauma-powered, sexually transgressive humor that made me fall in love with her comedy in the first place. Obviously, if you don’t like jokes about sex, death, and religion (arguably the three pillars of modern society), you should sit this one out. Otherwise, you should definitely watch Prodigal Daughter on Netflix. While you’re there, check out her other specials if you want to entertain a few friends or just treat yourself to a comedy that does what Dave Chappelle stopped making us do long ago: actually laugh!