Paul F. Tompkins

Lore & Background

In the world of Smiling Friends, Charlie is a creature of perpetual low-grade panic who has somehow become the most reliable person in the room. Tompkins' performance captures that paradox perfectly: Charlie is the one who notices the cat is missing, who double-checks the lock, who mutters 'this is fine' while the building literally catches fire. Yet he is also the one who shows up, who stays, who makes the terrible joke to break the silence. Tompkins builds that duality in his vocal performance—shifting between a tight, clipped delivery for anxiety and a warm, slightly slurred register for genuine affection, often within the same breath.

The character's design and behavior reflect Tompkins' own comedic philosophy, visible in his stand-up and earlier work: that the funniest material lives in the gap between what a person says and what they actually mean. Charlie's internal monologue—his rapid, spiraling thoughts that never quite match his external, stoic smile—is a direct extension of the observational comedy Tompkins honed on stage, translated into a medium where the audience can literally see the character's brain misfiring in real time.

Within the show's mythology, Charlie and Fred represent two poles of coping: Fred's breezy, almost supernatural acceptance of chaos versus Charlie's need to understand, categorize, and fix. Tompkins' writing and performance make Charlie the audience's surrogate—the one who asks the question the viewer is thinking but can't articulate. That makes him the emotional spine of a show that could easily float away into pure surrealism.

In Their Own Story

The office is quiet. Too quiet. Charlie's pencil hovers over the spreadsheet, the tip trembling in a way that has nothing to do with the spreadsheet and everything to do with the fact that the janitor's mop is making a sound like a slow, wet exhale. He blinks. Blinks again. The mop continues its slow, rhythmic drag across the linoleum. Somewhere down the hall, Fred is humming. Not a song. Just a hum. A content, unbothered hum. Charlie's left eye twitches. He types a number. Deletes it. Types it again. The mop exhales. He whispers, very quietly, to no one in particular, 'I'm going to need a new career.' Fred's humming drifts closer. Charlie smiles. It is not a smile that means what it looks like it means.

Reader's Guide

If you've ever wondered why Charlie's anxiety gags land with such surgical precision, the answer is Tompkins' stand-up background bleeding into the writing room. His rhythm—setup, beat, then a deadpan button that reframes everything—shows up in nearly every scene he's involved in. The show's writers have noted in interviews that many of Charlie's internal-monologue bits started as half-formed jokes Tompkins would throw into table reads, and the writers would build entire scenes around them.

His work on The Eric Andre Show trained him to play straight against chaos, which is essentially Charlie's entire job description. You can hear that training in how he delivers a line about a sentient toaster with the same flat affect he'd use for a tax form. It's not a choice; it's a reflex.

One recurring gag pattern—Charlie narrating his own panic in a calm, documentary-narrator tone while his body is visibly losing it—echoes the observational comedy of his live sets, where he'd describe a mundane situation with escalating specificity until the audience realized they were laughing at themselves. The show externalizes that: Charlie IS the audience, narrating their own spiraling thoughts back to them.

Tompkins has also mentioned in panel discussions that the physical comedy of Charlie—his stiff, slightly robotic movements—was partly a way to make a 2D animated character feel like a real person having a real panic attack, and that he'd reference his own body language from stand-up to guide the animators.

Did You Know?

• Tompkins' comedic style on Smiling Friends directly channels his years of performing on The Eric Andre Show, where playing completely straight against escalating absurdity became his signature mode.
• Charlie's design philosophy—stiff, slightly mechanical, always smiling—was developed to contrast with Fred's loose, fluid animation, creating a visual metaphor for their two coping styles.
• Tompkins' experience as a writer-actor on The League gave him a deep understanding of ensemble comedic timing, which he applied to the show's rapid back-and-forth between Charlie and Fred.
• The show's distinctive 2D animation style, with its flat colors and exaggerated expressions, was chosen in part to make Tompkins' vocal performance—his shifts between tight anxiety and warm affection—read clearly without