Crying and Driving

Paul F. Tompkins stepped onto the stage of the Palace Theatre in Los Angeles dressed in a black velvet jacket and a violet bow tie, with no microphone in his hand. By 2015, Tompkins had transitioned almost entirely away from standard stand-up club sets, choosing instead to present himself as a theatrical storyteller. This hour-long Comedy Central special captures him at a point in his career when he was already a dominant force in the podcast boom, and that loose, narrative-heavy style shapes the entire performance. Rather than firing off setups and punchlines, he unfurls long, conversational arcs about the late-stage milestones of his own life, focusing on his marriage and his embarrassing quest to obtain a driver’s license at the age of forty-one.\n\nThe material relies on Tompkins’s ability to turn mundane domestic adjustments into absurd sagas. He recounts the physical comedy of trying to share a home with another human being, which mostly involves accidentally scaring each other around corners, and details a bizarre visit to the Magic Castle. The show is not without darker detours, including a story about an amputated child’s foot and a recounting of his father’s generational contempt for having choices in life. But the core of the hour is a gentle self-deprecation, culminating in the title’s image of a grown man experiencing a sudden bout of scream weeping behind the wheel. Critics noted the transition, praising his shift from traditional joke writing into a more theatrical style of personal storytelling.