Tinder Live! With Lane Moore aims to feed your morbid curiosity and dating hopes

Lane Moore always knew her online dating horror stories were a potential comedy gold mine. The creator and host of Tinder Live!, the critically acclaimed comedy show now in its 10th year, immediately recognized just how relatable her experiences would be for women and femmes, even if they weren’t in the Tinder trenches themselves. 

“When I created Tinder Live,” Moore tells The A.V. Club, “no one was doing anything with dating app stuff or anything like that. It was so new, it seemed to be maybe just a New York or LA [thing]. Now it’s like, your grandma knows what Tinder is.” But the multihyphenate performer, who took her formerly New York City-based show on the road some five years ago, knew that if she could get people together in a venue to watch her “swipe right” all night, they were just as likely to be amused by her wildly inappropriate dating prospects as inspired by her vulnerability to embark on their own Tinder journey.

Moore, who recently released a paperback edition of You Will Find Your People: How To Make Meaningful Friendships As An Adult, says empowerment is just as key to her show as empathy: “When you’re on these dating apps, especially women and femmes, [there are] so many times when you feel really powerless, you feel really alone and you feel really shitty.” She drew from her own experience with apps like Tinder to create a Red Riding Hood-like persona: a kind of babe in the digital woods who is gradually—maddeningly, for any user who crosses her path—revealed to be a wolf in naïf’s clothing. This character, whom Moore embodies to hilarious and heartfelt effect on stage, is “an amalgamation of all the things that I noticed that so many men on dating apps wanted from me.” She says most guys she connected with via Tinder early on didn’t want her to be funny, they just wanted a very enthusiastic audience for their own humor, which went against her instincts as a comedian and actor with roles in series like Girls and Search Party. 

Ten years later, Moore has built a successful show—which has earned raves from the likes of The New York Times and NBC, and featured high-profile co-hosts like David Cross, Janeane Garofalo, Lamorne Morris, and Ted Leo—on her own brand of comedy, which is rooted in the tenet of always punching up. “I’ve always been very, very intentional about the show being very kind,” Moore says, even if the “profiles,” as she calls Tinder users, she interacts with on stage are ripe for takedowns. She quickly establishes to her audience for the night that she won’t be swiping right on someone who seems great, just for the sake of a quick joke. “That’s not interesting to me, comedically or as a person,” Moore says, especially given that there are so many more “mind-boggling” users to engage with. “We only swipe right on the most chaotic profiles,” she says, “and anybody who’s ever been on a dating app or has had friends on a dating app knows that’s like 90% of the profiles.” More often than not, they’re guys who publish a laundry list of attributes that their ideal woman must possess, with little awareness of their own shortcomings.

Once she finds someone with the right (read: wrong) energy, she matches them “chaotic” beat for beat, seeing if she can get them to say the “quiet part out loud.” One example she gave us on a call ahead of her November 2 show at Park West in Chicago involves a very demanding profile, whose detailed criteria for a partner required that she not be a “ferminist.” Moore’s Tinder Live persona is “playing dumb” incarnate, so she pretended to be appalled by what she imagined “ferminism” to be, even as she demonstrated that the backwards fellow had nothing to fear (and a lot to gain) from actual feminism. And yet the show is anything but didactic. Moore keeps the momentum going by keeping multiple fish on the line, equally interested in uncovering why one guy posted a bunch of photos of himself in a thong at his mother’s house as why so many profile pics for accounts outside of New York involve fish. Should one of these profiles lose the plot, Moore says she “stay[s] as good-natured as possible, unless the person’s just… they always are digging their own grave if a grave is dug.” 

There are occupational hazards, of course—sometimes, the profile Moore is interacting with realizes he’s on Tinder Live. Her nightly scrolling often yields someone who is clearly “really kind and caring and honest and really wants love and is empathetic and respectful and sweet,” which usually prompts “the entire audience to go, ‘aww,’ in unison.” These moments are a key part of the experience, Moore says, because “I want more for the men who are actually good and don’t have the greatest profiles, and I want more for the women who have to see [the bad] profiles.” 

Moore doesn’t view her show in a binary, or “men against women,” way; everyone is capable of being a bad dating prospect. But one thing that has changed since she launched her show is the discussion around the “male loneliness epidemic.” Although we could view the baffling profiles Moore encounters on stage as proof of this phenomenon, if not a contributing factor, Moore says there are “so many flaws in the conversation about male loneliness.” “We say, Oh, these poor men, they’re so lonely. That’s why they’re being so violent against women.” She rejects that notion: “Absolutely not. I literally wrote books about loneliness, and there are so many genders who are lonely.” She says much of the analysis around male loneliness elides the fact that “there are so many women who are lonely because they’ve experienced male violence.” But she also notes the role that the broader culture or society plays in setting men up to be lonely: “Many men have been so damaged by that culture. We didn’t want men to go to therapy. We didn’t want ’em to talk about their feelings. And that is so flawed and so wrong, and we’ve made strides to correct that.”

As she tours around the country for Tinder Live‘s 10th anniversary, Moore reflects on how the show has evolved. The biggest change is how much more “ubiquitous” it is now, with “teenage girls doing versions of Tinder Live on TikTok.” But her original mission remains firmly in place: Moore wants women and femmes to see her having fun on Tinder, albeit while ribbing some of its more “toxic” users, to reinforce the idea that they can also have fun on the apps, and in dating more generally. Moore is frequently approached by audience members who tell her they’ve “redownloaded the apps because what [they’re] realizing now is that [they were] taking it so seriously, and now [they’re] realizing you can just say anything and it doesn’t matter.” Asked if her decade of sending up the apps has made her more or less optimistic about online dating, Moore readily says she remains hopeful. Citing the title of her 2023 book, she says “You will find your people at the exact right time. You’ll find your partner at the exact right time.” And it may even be at a Tinder Live show.