Tompkins, king of comedy podcast guests, has a new show, 'Varietopia.' It premieres Sept. 20 at the Lodge Room in Highland Park.
When he recently revisited those early days, digitizing his collection of taped stand-up sets, he “would cringe,” he said. “It’s not my fault, back then, that I wasn’t as good as I am now. But it was weird that I couldn’t see it as an evolution.”
It was the year of pandemic-related closures that revived his desire to put on a big show. He got burnt out before, he said, when “getting people to buy tickets felt like more work than the show did, and then the show felt like work after allwork.” He didn’t have that problem this time around — tickets for “Varietopia” sold out within 24 hours.
The always seriously dressed funnyman is often the bridesmaid in mainstream entertainment — a guest on shows from “Frasier” to “Rutherford Falls,” an unseen phone operator in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia,” a disembodied voice in cartoons — and never the bride. He starred in TV pilots, including “The Peter Principle” with Amy Adams in 2000, that weren’t picked up. He’s worked steadily but often invisibly or just a little underground.
The son of a railroad man and the fifth of six children, Tompkins moved to L.A. after eight years of stand-up in the Philly-area club circuit. Here he discovered the alt comedy scene, where the likes of Janeane Garofalo and Bob Odenkirk were doing conversational, almost avant-garde stand-up in bookstores and coffee shops.
Odenkirk and David Cross noticed Tompkins in the absurdist sketch troupe the Skates and hired him as a writer on “Mr. Show.” For fans of offbeat comedy, that feat puts Tompkins on Mt. Olympus. It ignited his career and led to headlining sets in clubs, writing on “Real Time With Bill Maher” and other shows, itinerant acting gigs and eventually hosting his own TV shows.