We’re sitting outside Bloomfield’s Citizen Frances on a bright, breezy fall day. It is what Carolyn Taylor calls “the fulcrum of the County’s queer arts community.” Everybody knows Taylor here — or, at least, recognizes her. Smiles abound. Hers is one of the most identifiable faces in Canadian comedy.

She arrived in Wellington for a short-term escape from the pandemic — and has called the County home ever since. As she has put down roots, others have followed. Today, she cherishes the many artist friends who live within a ten-minute walk.

Taylor got her first laugh on stage at the age of nine, while performing with the Children’s Shakespeare Company in Montreal. She came out on stage dressed as a lion and uttered “roar.” The audience broke up.

 “I didn’t understand why they were laughing, but I liked it,” she explains. That early experience still informs her comedy. “I like to keep a level of not knowing, a sacred unknowing,” she calls it. It means not staying stuck in her own head, but being open, relying on her instincts.

That creative instinct has long been a source of direction. So has a benevolent universe, and her mother’s belief in her. When Taylor switched her major at Queen’s University to include drama, her mother, single and bringing up three kids, was skeptical. The plan was Osgoode Hall for law school. But everything changed when Taylor landed a role in a big stage production during her first year. Two weeks later her mother recanted.

“I’m projecting my fears onto you,” her mother confessed. “You’ve never shown me you can’t do something.” Her mother’s gifts — confidence, self-reflection, and love — set the course for a career that looks textbook in hindsight, but no script exists for this chosen path.

Taylor’s first professional gig was with The Second City, where her troupe would test out material live eight shows a week, workshopping together at night. That experience helped her to live in a constant state of hypotheticals. “My improv brain informs my life,” she says.

Next was writing for This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a job she calls “The Humilatorium.” She and her colleagues were charged with producing one-liners they read out loud for quick approvals —or, more often, rejections. It was about getting the debris out. By eliminating the obvious they could surface insights that weren’t immediately apparent. It felt like a kind of magic beyond her control. Sometimes scenes they’d laboured over would tank, while the spontaneous would go viral. “Where was that hiding?” she’d wonder.

And then there was the turning point, when the drive to write in her own voice became unstoppable. She was $1300 in overdraft, living “down to the bone.” She and her creative partners — the team that would become known as Baroness Von Sketch — were ready to give up on their dream of a new comedy series. Taylor had a massive, cathartic cry, accepting that she’d reached the end of the road. 

And then, the universe came through. They were green lit: the CBC ordered six episodes. After five glorious years, Baroness Von Sketch ended with stacks of awards and accolades, and a social media following that lives on today.

Next, her original docu-comedy, an unscripted, six-episode series called I Have Nothing, stages an ongoing collision between chaos and control. A spark while listening to the Whitney Houston song in her car led to a quest to choreograph Olympic skaters, first as a solo act on stage, and later with the Olympians themselves, for television. Using hilarious physical comedy, the routines toy with reality versus fiction, what’s real and what isn’t. The series launched in Canada in 2023, and in the United States in 2025.

She now guests on various television shows and performs live comedy. She’s in rehearsals for an upcoming Canadian Stage production of Ann Marie Macdonald’s Good Night Desdemona Good Morning Juliet. On Friday, she stars in Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit Red Rabbit at The Andrew in Picton, where she’ll be handed a script, sight unseen, to bring to life before the audience. Her “improv brain” will no doubt fuel her, as will her community of artists, both past and present.

With Taylor here, it feels like the stars are truly aligned over the County.