When Robin Tyler first appeared on Showtime’s “1st Annual Funny Women’s Show” in 1978, she asked host Phyllis Diller to introduce her as a lesbian. Diller said she could do the next best thing — calling her a feminist, because she viewed the words as somewhat interchangeable to her mainstream audience. She addressed the topic from the stage anyway, with a joke that made her television’s first out lesbian comic.
Tyler, who is now 84, recently took the stage for a 15-minute set at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. She’s still telling some of the jokes that got her famous, but she’s also sprinkling in new material in preparation for a longer project. She talked about marriage, religion, gender roles and geography — but there’s one topic she refuses to platform: Donald Trump.
“I don’t want to give him attention,” she explained, adding that she thinks he’s a sick and psychologically dangerous man for promoting fascism.
That refusal doesn’t mean her comedy — which has historically blurred the lines between entertainment and activism — is any less political today than it was in the 1970s.
In fact, she pokes fun at other right-wing boogeymen.
“The Proud Boys are going around [saying], ‘Jews will not replace us,’” she said during her recent set. “Yeah, like we’d really want to replace a bunch of men in polyester suits who carry tiki torches.”
“Jews make up 0.2% of the population, but we’re 22% of the Nobel Prize Winners,” she continued. “So the Proud Boys will not replace us.”
As a young, Jewish kid in Winnipeg, Canada, Tyler befriended a Ukrainian neighbor, even though the two communities typically didn’t mix.
“What’s great about being gay is you don’t have to follow those rules,” she said. “You’re just looking for anybody else that’s gay.”
She was the leader of their little gang of three misfits — Robin, Terry and Albert — who didn’t have language for what made them different from their peers. They just knew they were most comfortable with each other.
Comedy as Identity
Tyler was involved in show business before she ever left home. When she failed to show interest in boys, her mother sent her to a performing arts school hoping she’d find a first love. And she did: a girl named Sheri Bernstein.
It’s there that she also learned the word to describe who she is. She recounted the moment in her first solo comedy album, “Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Groom,” which was released in 1979 — the same year she produced and emceed the main stage for the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.
After discovering the word “lesbian” in an issue of The Ladder, Tyler was so excited about the new vocabulary that she took the news straight to the halls — shouting, “Hooray! I’m a lesbian! I’m a lesbian!” One of her theater teachers — who Tyler imitates with an accent that resembles Dame Maggie Smith — stepped into the hall to respond, “There, there dear, we’re all thespians. That’s why we’re here!”
Her mother didn’t take it well. Her father tried to understand her by reading the only literature he could find on the subject — a sensationalist tabloid that didn’t paint LGBTQ+ people in a good light.
Tyler left home and briefly lived in Toronto, where she once met two women at a gay bar and later joined them to see Judy Garland in concert. After the event, those two women reported her to Canadian police for being a lesbian in exchange for a $25 reward. The other women admitted to their sexuality — but Tyler refused. If she had, she never would have made it to the U.S. To immigrate, she had to sign a different document asserting she wasn’t a sex worker, drug addict, communist or homosexual.
After finally making her way to New York City in 1962, Tyler’s knack for talking herself out of trouble also helped her make headlines. When she was arrested at a drag ball for “female impersonation,” despite not trying to look like anyone but herself that night, she didn’t know who to call from the station. It certainly wouldn’t be her mother, and she couldn’t afford a lawyer. So she called the New York Post. Police didn’t believe her when she tried to convince them of her true identity — but the reporter confirmed it.
The next day, the paper ran an infamous headline: Cops Grab 44 Men and a Real Girl in Slacks.
Tyler then found a job performing at Club 82 — a famous drag and cabaret spot — as a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman as Judy Garland. This was before soundtracks and lip-syncs were commonplace on the professional stage, so Tyler — who was a talented singer — performed Garland’s hits.
Club 82 is also where she met her comedy partner and longtime romantic love, Pat Harrison — who was a fashion model at the time. Harrison was seated with a lover near the stage. Tyler ignored that hurdle and introduced herself at intermission: “Hi, my name is Robin Tyler — and I’m gonna marry you.”
Nothing happened that night, but she later ran into Harrison at a bar, where other patrons fawned over her beauty. Tyler took a different approach. Harrison didn’t need another person to fuss over her, Tyler said.
Harrison invited Tyler back to her place for dinner. The timing was perfect because Tyler was starving. She’d been let go from Club 82 and needed a good meal.
“I know what you’re here for,” Harrison told Tyler, pulling her down in a passionate embrace.
“But I was there for the chicken! That was the truth!” Tyler told me, adding that she had no energy and couldn’t stop thinking about the meal she was promised.
“I would have been better had I eaten,” she laughed.
Harrison didn’t seem to mind. The pair quickly moved in together and were partnered for 55 years until Harrison’s death. In 2008, Tyler wed Diane Olson as the first California couple to marry after same-sex marriage was legalized. Although she was happy to marry Olson, she cried at the service, mourning the missed opportunity to marry Harrison — who she views as her life partner and soulmate.
“The most important thing in my life is not what I did or all of the activism,” she said. “It’s the fact that Pat Harrison and I loved each other for 55 years. That was my greatest achievement.”
When I expressed condolences for that loss, Tyler quipped, “Well, I haven’t lost her. I know where she is.”
Comedy as Partnership
Harrison joined Tyler on tour in Vietnam in the late 1960s as Tyler pursued a singing career fronting a band of five women — four of whom were gay. Tyler isn’t sure how or why, but the group often drew large LGBTQ+ audiences. When Tyler couldn’t afford to give the musicians a fair raise, she became a solo performer, which evolved into a comedic act.
“Patty would start heckling me, and I’d heckle her back,” she said. “And we got laughs.”
That sparked the idea to become a duo — which led to TV appearances, pilots, and an offer to star in their own show. They were told to bill themselves as Robin and Rachel Tyler — a sister act.
“You have to be a sister act, or people will think you’re gay,” Tyler said, repeating what the head of ABC told the pair. “But he knew we were gay. I’m Jewish from Canada. She’s a high-fashion model. Do we look like sisters?”
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When the couple went back on tour in Vietnam, they were permitted to be more authentic. Tyler said the experience completely changed their perspectives — transforming them into anti-war activists who centered political material in their act, donning blue jeans and T-shirts instead of makeup and formalwear.
But the network still attempted to cultivate an image that mimicked “Laverne & Shirley” and aimed their spot at younger audiences.
“It didn’t work,” Tyler said.
That contract ended abruptly after Tyler made headlines for her outspoken activism, which often included LGBTQ+ and feminist causes. To protest the lack of scholarships for women athletes in college sports in 1970, she and Harrison sat on the 40-yard line before a Rams vs. Raiders football game, for instance. An article about the stunt referenced them as “a well-endowed redhead” and an “equally curvaceous blonde.”
Their act didn’t shy away from LGBTQ+ identity. In the opening lines of their second album “Wonder Women,” which was released in 1970, Tyler asked the audience, “How many of you think we’re you-know-what?” then explained they met in the “usual” way: Harrison was driving the truck, and Tyler was loading it.
They started producing shows that tackled heavier issues — such as abortion. Harrison suggested that Tyler talk more directly about being a lesbian during her stand-up — but Tyler wasn’t sure how to do this from the stage in a way that wasn’t self-deprecating. Although she admired the talent and success of various women comics at the time, she didn’t like that many made themselves the object of the humor rather than directing audiences to laugh at systems of power and the people who uphold them.
“How do I make it funny without making fun of myself?” she asked.
Comedy as An Aggressive Art Form
Tyler described comedy as an aggressive art form, and the women of the era comforted audiences by turning that aggression on themselves. She and Harrison turned all of their punchlines onto men instead.
One of Tyler’s most famous quips comes from a story she tells about a man who heckled her during a performance. When he asked if she was a lesbian, she responded, “Are you the alternative?”
Tyler said lesbians were often accused of not having a sense of humor when jokes were made at their expense. She rebutted — underlining that they were sick of jokes always landing on them and didn’t want to let men play target practice anymore. Men generally didn’t appreciate her jokes either, and Tyler was labeled “anti-male.”
“When I started to do gay comedy, there was already antigay comedy,” she explained, recalling a time when another artist tried to get away with using the f-slur in his act. The gay men in the audience — who had come to see Tyler perform — booed him off the stage.
Tyler started telling painful and personal stories with a comedic spin.
“People don’t realize that when it’s never been done before, the hard part is you have to invent it,” she said. “The great part is there’s nothing on the walls, so you get to throw everything on the walls. You get to try everything.”
She developed a campy, commercialized style with mass appeal while talking about subjects that really mattered to her.
Harrison continued to co-write some of Tyler’s solo comedy work — which criticized economic policy, high-profile anti-LGBTQ+ activists, gun violence, religion, discrimination and war. The jokes she tells that tend to be viewed as the most controversial are about Christianity — in which she reimagines biblical stories and adds characters.
“We had to walk away from television, but I don’t care,” she said, adding that she feels bad for performers who never felt they could be themselves or stand up for their beliefs because of their jobs.
“I chose freedom, and what could be better than freedom?” she continued. “Freedom is never a sacrifice. I ended up with the better end of the deal.”
Always quick-witted, Tyler could always easily find a funny but intellectual remark during interviews. But it wasn’t formal education that influenced her politics. “I thought Marx was Groucho and Lenin was John,” she once joked in an interview. She learned her values through the collective spirit of theater — where people share responsibilities and swap roles to work together for the greater good.
Tyler was ahead of her time in the way she developed and tested her material. She was careful to run her jokes by a political support group and trusted allies, who helped her refine the work so it wouldn’t accidentally harm a vulnerable group of people. Instead, her jokes took aim at the establishment and those in power.
Harrison and Tyler received threats for being such outspoken activists. Tyler didn’t realize that receiving death threats wasn’t the norm for other performers; she assumed this was just part of visibility. She took threats seriously, but they didn’t change her or prevent her from continuing with the work.
“The degree of our resistance will parallel the degree of their insistence,” Tyler said — repeating a phrase she learned when she was young. “In other words, the more they oppressed us, the more we fought back. And it was a privilege to be able to do it.”
Comedy as Resistance
Tyler eventually organized more than 20 women’s music and comedy festivals in the 1980s and 1990s — the first explicitly trans-inclusive festivals of their kind. She’d been inspired to host a new event after receiving threats for supporting trans attendees at another.
Tyler underlined that the civil rights she has always been fighting for are still not guaranteed — as LGBTQ+ people are not supported by comprehensive civil rights legislation at the federal level and many states lack local protections. But comedy should still be used as a tool for resistance to advance that cause, she said.
Her favorite comedian is George Carlin — especially his most political sets. Otherwise, she prefers BBC mysteries these days. Bad comedy feels like listening to nails on a chalkboard, she said.
One performer she’d rather see fade out of the mainstream is Dave Chappelle — who has doubled down on “anti-woke” routines that promote anti-trans sentiment by punching down at a vulnerable community.
“It’s pathetic,” Tyler said.
Tyler is surprised that people aren’t demonstrating outside of his shows and underlined that LGBTQ+ people and allies should be doing more than expressing disagreement on the internet. She hopes they’ll protest to fight back.
She said she’d gladly meet him on stage for a bit of a comedy battle, although she doesn’t think he’s likely to take her up on the offer “because he’s a bully, and bullies are always cowards,” she said.
If he ever does, she’s confident she could hold her own.
“To be an activist, you have to be quick on your feet,” she said.