Lane Moore is standing in front of a crowd of 300 people at Brooklyn’s Bell House, reading a 5,000-word sext she received from a 19-year-old on Tinder.
The textual masterpiece is projected larger-than-life on a screen behind her. The audience shifts and chuckles uncomfortably during the narrated barrage of pornographic scenarios. She stumbles on, “As I hump you so hard,” stifles a guffaw, breathes deep. “I told myself I could do this,” she moans sadly. Then she continues, because Moore signed up for this. Literally.
Moore, a Brooklyn-based comedian, singer and writer, currently headlines a wildly popular monthly show called Tinder Live, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: She logs onto her Tinder account in front of a live audience, and, with the help of a rotating panel of guests, proceeds to chat with unwitting matches.
“It’s like a dating game show in a lot of ways,” she says. “I wanted it to be this thing that made everybody feel less alone. We’re all hanging out and we’re all just feeling like s–t together so that we don’t feel like s–t.”
It plays out like a kind of a group therapy session, with Moore serving as comedic social psychoanalyst. She introduces her show by saying, “Tinder is the place where sadness goes to f–k” — and she’s only half-joking. For almost three years now, she’s been making light of the exhaustion, frustration, apathy and general nonsense we’ve all had to endure from the popular dating app — and it’s cathartic for her, too.
In February 2014, Lane walked in on her two roommates sitting at the kitchen table playing on their phones. “I was like, are you both here alone but together on Tinder at the same time?” she recalls. Though she’d dated on popular sites like OK Cupid, she hadn’t taken the Tinder plunge yet. “I didn’t really care,” she says. “I didn’t see why it was any different than anything else.” But seeing her roommates so transfixed by the app convinced her, and she signed up on the spot.
“Some people ask when I came up with the idea for the show, how long I’d been on Tinder,” she says. “It was literally the second I got on that I came up with it.”
She immediately grabbed her camera and recorded the group Tinder session with her roommates, put it on YouTube, and the rest is history. “The first show that I had was at The Pit, and we didn’t really tell anybody about it, but it was half-full,” she says. “The second one sold out.”
Clearly she’d touched upon a common point of pain. Since then, Moore has become — as she states — “the mayor” of Tinder, hosting sold-out shows and also running the popular Tumblr site “Male Feminists of Tinder.”
“I’m just a weird person who gets lonely,” she says. “And when I start taking Tinder a little bit too seriously, that’s when I take a break. It’s supposed to be fun! As much as I joke about it, I think a lot of things that I use for comedy are things I love. I actually love Tinder — I have to, because I’m spending so much time with it.”
She balances a fake profile, which she uses in the show, with a real one, which she uses to date — but sometimes she’s forced to reconcile the two.
“There have been several shows where someone will pop up while I’m using the fake profile and I will swoon,” she says. “I’ll be like, ‘I’m saving that for later.’ And I’ll talk to them, but then it’s awkward because I have to go through those hoops of being like, ‘And P.S., I totally matched with you during my show.’ I tell them my real name and stuff before I go on the date — I’m transparent, and then it just becomes, ‘Oh, we met in a weird way.’”
Aside from garnering her the occasional IRL date, her show persona has also made her bolder. “I just say whatever the f–k I want. Granted, it’s a different situation from having a guy you really want to impress, but I don’t care and I just go for it,” she says. “Tinder Live, in a lot of ways, is an experiment — I can say anything I want, and they just love it. She’s so stupid and kind of crazy but she’s also a fun train wreck. I get it, I get why they like her.”
And when Moore joins the rest of us in experiencing the agonies and ecstasies of the app outside her show, she copes with setbacks using similarly light techniques. During one of her worst dates, a match proceeded to sling homophobic, transphobic and pro-rape-culture statements at her over drinks.
“I went home and I was really upset,” she says. So she did what she does best — took her pain to the people, with a tongue-in-cheek spin. “I made a joke about him on my Twitter because I was just so shocked,” she says. “I was like, ‘I bet he’s going home right now and he’s just like, ‘F–king dumb b–ch like HATES HOMOPHOBIA.’ Like, why would you be angry at me?”
And, as evidenced by her ticket sales and 27,000 Twitter followers, people are more than enamored of her honesty — they’re comforted by it. “Most of what I do with any of my art forms is because it’s something I need,” says Moore. “It’s something that would be really important to me if someone gave it to me. So I want to be able to give that to other people.”
And Moore’s refreshing spin on the realities of modern love isn’t limited to Tinder — she’s the GLAAD award-winning sex & relationships editor of Cosmopolitan, and she’s been in the thick of the New York City scene for six years, dating both men and women — her unique perspective cuts through societal conditioning.
“I don’t generally find it to be true that the genders are that far off. We have a culture in general that just wants to be coupled — we all want to be close to people, so I don’t like the idea that it’s just women who are man-crazy,” she says. “People just want to form meaningful connections and they’re human beings — they want to cuddle with somebody and be intimate with somebody and be close to somebody, and my guy friends say that too!”
If anything, more pressure to play the dating game comes from the city at large.
“We live in a city that’s largely like, ‘Don’t settle down — why would you settle down?’” she says. “And I wonder if it’s just harder for men because they’re encouraged to pursue, pursue, pursue, pursue. I know men who don’t do that and who want a relationship but went through that period trying to force themselves to be like, ‘I just have to go out and date and hunt,’ and then they realized that’s not who they are. My theory is that a lot of people actually want that, and they’re just scared or feel pressured to not be like that.”
Where Moore does see a notable difference is in the way that men and women present themselves on Tinder. “After the show, a lot of people will show me their Tinder profiles and ask me what I think,” she says. “And I think a lot of men in particular don’t know how to market themselves. I’m like, ‘I’m sitting right in front of you, and objectively I would probably go out with you, but this guy here? I would swipe so left on!’ I don’t think it’s that there are more awful people who are men on Tinder, I don’t agree with that. I think it’s just that women, on a larger whole, know how to portray what they want to portray.”
And that marked contrast in presentation is what has served as fodder for Tinder Live, during which Moore interacts with mostly male profiles.
“I don’t talk about women on the show because I figure the whole world makes fun of women all the time and when women’s profiles come up, their profiles aren’t garbage-y,” Moore says. “They’re just people! If I find one that’s really funny — once there was a girl who had Nair on her eyebrows and talked about seeing a porn tape of her parents — I talked about that on the show because that was hilarious. But the thing is, the first thing you’re going to do when you see a woman is you’re going to go to her physical appearance, and it’s not interesting to me. I’m not going to call anybody ugly or whatever — I don’t do that with men!”
So after all the left and right swipes, the super-likes, the inappropriate sextual advances, and the frustrating two-drink conversations, does Moore still believe it’s possible to find love on Tinder?
“Why not? It’s possible anywhere,” she says. “I don’t necessarily think it’s an increasing-your-odds thing. A lot of the people I know, they say, ‘Oh, you’ll find someone using an app,’ but there’s no one way. Most of us are always kind of looking — if someone awesome comes along, you’re always kind of ready. Who doesn’t want happiness? Everybody wants love!”