I adore Lane Moore. She’s a gifted human with an impressive perspective on the human condition. Her two books, How To Be Alone and You Will Find Your People, are genius. I’ve been following her for years, yet I haven’t seen her signature show, Tinder Live!
Thanks to the good people of SF Sketchfest and their persistence in bringing her out west, I finally got to experience it. Holy shitballs, that was magic.
The premise is simple enough: Moore hooks her phone up to a projector and, along with a pair of fellow comedians, “roasts” her Tinder matches. If magic happens, she gets to chat with these matches in front of an audience. In theory, the matches don’t know they are part of a live show.
I will note that we never actually see the profile Moore uses. Due to the resolution of her phone on a big screen, we can only barely make out the picture when she gets a match. It remains to be a “controlled” environment. So folks won’t easily be able to create a fake bonkers profile in hopes of getting on the show.
Also, despite Moore being openly bisexual, her fake profile is straight. The main reason is that, well, women get roasted in real life too often. Also, men simply have far sillier profiles.
Our special guests tonight were Busy Phillips, a popular childhood crush among millennial men, and Paul F. Tompkins, famed improv comic and best-dressed person in any situation. Thomkins admitted that tonight was his first time experiencing a dating app, and shouted out the originator, OK Cupid!, as something that developed shortly after he met his wife. Phillips, on the other hand, seemed to know them somewhat well, and that prepared her nicely.
Our first profile was a muscled-up, heavily sunburnt beach bunny that went by the name of Michael mike. (Yup. The “mike” was all lowercase.) I will admit that his body made me wonder if I should finally quit ice cream for good and add cardio to my workouts, but I also don’t need to dismiss the few joys in life for visible abs. I also learned that Tinder now lets users pay to hide their age, which seems pretty unfair. I also couldn’t tell if Michael mike was 35 or 65, but I was very confident that he was slowly developing skin cancer and needed to see a doctor state.
Throughout the night, we saw a variety of profiles ranging from boring to awkward to horny to awkwardly horny. There was an airline pilot that was looking for a one-night stand only. A handful of genuinely earnest men did craft a decent profile. But those were few and far between. More often than not, the starkness of the dating scene for women was on full display. This played well for Phillips, who vibed intensely well with Moore, and the two played off each other so well that I was gasping for air between laughs. Poor Paul F Thomkins was clearly the third wheel, and a bit out of his element here. He dropped some good one-liners here and there but understood who the stars of the show were, and those were the two women who really understood the field.
It was a great show. It began with the cartoonish Michael mike and ended with Moore chatting with, um, Kermit the Frog (who was also lifting weights in all of his pictures, but I’m fairly certain I can out-bench him). It was a lovely, lovely evening. I’d gladly sit through that 100 times over. The good news is that she’s doing a livestream on February 15th, and tickets for that are available here. Her band, It Was Romance, has a new record out that same weekend called Final Girl, and you can presave that here!
