Lily Tomlin Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Amy Gross

Critical Essay by Amy Gross

[Lily Tomlin's] operating, more and more, from a comic perspective she discovered, and from there, things are not so much funny ha-ha as funny amazing. Watching her being one of her characters, you would not double over in hysteria, but you might well shake your head, marveling, and smiling a smile of recognition: ain't that the truth. And the Tomlin truth—her sad-sweet sensibility, meltingly compassionate and almost surgically delicate—is that we humans are totally absurd but endearingly so … a little like the seven dwarfs maybe. (p. 186)

Amy Gross, "Lily Tomlin on Lily Tomlin" (courtesy Amy Gross; copyright © 1975 by The Condé Nast Publications Inc.), in Mademoiselle, Vol. 81, No. 11, November, 1975, pp. 111, 186, 188-89.