This past Friday, comedian Taylor Tomlinson posted a short video on her popular Instagram account with the caption, “@sammorril and I haven’t been dating that long and shit is getting real. Stay tuned.”
In the video, Tomlinson and her boyfriend, fellow stand-up comic Sam Morril, are scrolling through the impending coronavirus doom on her phone. “I don’t know, I feel like this could get bad, like we could get stuck inside for a long time,” she says. But he’s not worried.
“It’s not going to be bad,” he says. “We’re going to have nothing to do but have sex for weeks. It’s gonna be great.”
You’ll have to watch the final few seconds of the clip to see how that turned out.
Five days later, things have gotten really bad and Tomlinson and Morril are racking up tens of thousands of views on what is now a full-on coronavirus quarantine web series with 10 hilarious episodes to date about how their new relationship is holding up during these tense times.
I reached the pair by phone this week to check in and when I asked how they’re doing, Tomlinson replied, “You know, we are, uh... indoors for the foreseeable future!”
As for what made them want to start posting comedic vignettes about their relationship on Instagram, Morril says, “Well, we kind of lost control of our careers about a week ago” before adding, “not just our careers, but our lives.” The web series has given them the “illusion” that they have some sort of control over both. “And it’s fun to be creative together,” he adds, earnestly.
They have been dating for just over six months and have given each other some tags for jokes and other stand-up tips, but never planned to collaborate quite like this.
Morril is a New York-based comic who relies on paid comedy clubs to pay his bills. He’s performed stand-up on Conan and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and you may have caught him playing an open mic comedian in last year’s Joker.
His latest special, called I Got This, was released by Comedy Central on YouTube in early February. Admitting the pay was pretty low compared to his previous special, he says he was hoping to make up the difference on the road this year. “That was my opening joke in Michigan last week,” he says. “I said, basically, I put this out for nearly nothing and now every news reporter is saying don’t go out.”
Tomlinson, who at 25 is seven years Morril’s junior, just released her own debut hour-long special Quarter-Life Crisis on Netflix less than a month ago. It was a huge break for a comedian her age and under normal circumstances, she would be about to launch a nationwide tour to capitalize on that newfound notoriety. Instead she’s stuck at home.
The pair missed performing live and felt compelled to find a way to make people laugh even if they couldn’t get on stage. “And we are genuinely stuck together so we figured this would keep us sharp and creative and not at each other’s throats,” Tomlinson says.
Up until last week, they were actually in a long-distance relationship. Morril lives in New York and Tomlinson is in Los Angeles, but he was out visiting her last week when the seriousness of the pandemic really started to take hold.
He considered flying back to New York, but “after we went shopping,” he says, “I figured I should stay out here for a while.” Tomlinson jokes that once they had the snacks he liked, he didn’t want to leave. Now they are spending every moment together in her apartment.
“We’re basically a Marriage Story origin story right now,” Tomlinson jokes, explaining that every episode of the web series is based, at least in part, on something they have actually gone through together.
As an example, she points to episode seven, which features a comic take on how they fight as a couple. “That is 100 percent something that’s happened in our relationship,” she says. “Mid-fight, when we’ve realized it we’ve started laughing, like, this is a bit.”
Next, the couple is planning to launch a new podcast from their house called “This Is Important to Me.” The premise is that they will force each other to watch movies the other one hasn’t seen and then talk about them together. Morril has already made Tomlinson watch Austin Powers, which came out when she was just 2 years old.
“I thought it was great,” she says of the Mike Myers classic. “I was surprised at how well it held up. I did not expect to like it as much as I did.” Billy Madison, on the other hand, didn’t do it for her.
With the comedy clubs closed and all tour dates canceled for the foreseeable future, it’s online projects like these that are allowing comics to stay funny when live audiences aren’t an option.
“That’s why we’re doing the web series,” Tomlinson says. “Also, we don’t see each other that much, so for us, we were like, ‘I mean, this is kind of cool, we get to hang out more.”
When I ask if they’re sick of each other yet, she replies, “Not yet!”
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