Lily Tomlin performs at Skokie’s North Shore Center

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Lily Tomlin

Updated: February 24, 2012 9:44AM

Lily Tomlin’s comedy, like politics, is all about character, and she will reacquaint audiences with several of her iconic creations when she takes the stage of the Centre East Theatre for two shows on Sat. Feb. 25 at 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.

When did the Oscar-nominated and Emmy, Tony, and Grammy-winning comedian and actress return to the road?

“I’ve never stopped,” Tomlin, 72, laughed in a phone interview. “I tell people this tour started 40 years ago,. It’s actually longer when you consider the shows I put on (as a young girl) on my back porch.”

Actually, it’s been 50 years. In 1962, Tomlin left her native Detroit for New York to pursue a career as a comedian. The field, at the time, was not populated by many women, and certainly not any whose act was more akin to performance art than the traditional stand-up of, say, Joan Rivers, Totie Fields, or Phyllis Diller.

Tomlin cites comedienne Jean Carroll, who predated them, as a subversive influence. Carroll did not tell jokes that put herself down. Beautiful and elegant in a cocktail dress, she told jokes about being a homemaker and her husband.

Chicago influences

The contemporaries who most resonated with her, Tomlin said, were a Chicago contingent: Elaine May and Mike Nichols, Shelley Berman, and Bob Newhart –– all of whom did character pieces and monologues. But she was also influenced by the impeccable character work of Imogene Coca from “Your Show of Shows,” radio characters such as Hattie McDaniel’s Beulah, and entertainer Beatrice Lillie. “I always had very eclectic tastes,” she said.

Tomlin’s humanistic worldview was shaped by her childhood. “I lived in a predominantly black neighborhood on the fringes of a rich neighborhood,” She said. “I lived in an old apartment house and was always observing. I would go from apartment to apartment and force myself on the people who lived there. Younger families, I would join in and do whatever they did. But with older people I’d want to take a nice long visit. They’d want to go to bed and they’d say, ‘Your mother probably wants you to go home.’”

Tomlin was a born entertainer. “I would tell a few jokes, throw pearls around my neck like Bea Lillie, then I might do a magic trick and then a dance because I took ballet and tap. Then I would imitate my dad coming home loaded and trying to hang up his clothes, and I would tell Jean Carroll’s jokes.”

Old friends

Her Skokie appearances will feature several of her beloved characters, whose lives have changed over the years. Former telephone operator Ernestine, for example, now works for an insurance company denying health care to people, while Edith Ann, for decades five-and-a-half years old, has reached a milestone: she is now six. The show will include some audience Q&A, and it will also incorporate video that pokes fun at Tomlin’s celebrity.

Tomlin continues to divide her time between comedic and dramatic roles. She portrays the disapproving upper class mother of therapist Lisa Kudrow in the buzzworthy Showtime series, “Web Therapy.” She received an Emmy nomination for her devastating performance as the anything but innocent wife of a Madoff-like swindler in “Damages.”

These days, Tomlin greatly admires Kristin Wiig (“She’s wonderful”) as well as stand-up Wanda Sykes and the man behaving badly series, “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” She doesn’t watch a lot of reality television, but from a character standpoint, “you know I love it,” she laughed, “although you don’t really know how spontaneous it is or how much they are egged on until it’s like another version of ‘The Jerry Springer Show.’”

But at heart, she’s still most inspired by observation, still very much like the curious little girl who used to bedevil her neighbors. “I have this affection for people,” she said. “I saw so many moments of them at their best and at their worst, but I just knew they were nothing else but poor old humans at heart.”