Robby Hoffman was born into an audience. Growing up as one of 10 kids in a Hasidic Jewish family in Brooklyn, the comedian says she has always been most comfortable in a crowd.
“I’ve always lived in very dense apartments or neighborhoods,” she says. “It feels very natural. I love being with so many people, the more the merrier.”
But 2025 is the year that Hoffman’s audience reached new heights. She appeared on HBO’s “Hacks” Season 4 as Randi, the off-beat assistant for Paul W. Downs and Meg Stalter’s new management company — a role that earned Hoffman an Emmy nomination for outstanding guest actress in a comedy. She also married her longtime girlfriend, former ICU nurse and “Bachelorette” star Gabby Windey. And to cap off the year, Hoffman’s first Netflix stand-up special, “Wake Up” — directed by John Mulaney — premiered on the platform Sunday.
“I’ve never been the overnight success,” Hoffman says of her career. “I never had connections or the fast track in any way, shape or form. So I just got used to slow and steady wins the race.”
Hoffman credits the origins of her career to her upbringing. She became culturally informed about the world of comedy through checking out comedy films on trips to the library organized by her mother every weekend. But most of all, Hoffman knew being funny ran in her family.
“We were all funny,” Hoffman explains. “Not everything was a funny situation. We weren’t a situation comedy, a lot of it was dreadful.”
The comedian recalls a specific instance as a child when she noticed a glass jar labeled Hoffman Emergency Fund contained only a few quarters. Realizing this was all her single mother of 10 kids had saved for the entire family, Hoffman says she and her mother burst into laughter. “It was heartbreaking, and also extremely funny.”
The family moved from Brooklyn to Montreal, where Hoffman went to college at McGill University. She planned to study accounting, after an academic advisor said it would be the best route to maximize the highest paying career for the least amount of school. But during this time, she discovered the Just for Laughs comedy festival and her love of stand-up. On her first day of graduate school for her CPA certificate, after already accepting a job at an accounting firm, Hoffman dropped out to pursue comedy.
Looking at the careers of Ellen DeGeneres and Jerry Seinfeld, Hoffman decided that the best route to a career in comedy would be through writing a TV show. Using the free computer given to her by her accounting job, Hoffman wrote a script in Microsoft Word — manually formatting the pages to mimic the look of a screenplay since she could not afford script-writing software like Final Draft.
Hoffman brought the script to the offices at HBO Canada and other networks. She posed as a courier, telling the receptionists that the script was requested by an executive. “This was the benefit of not knowing much about stand-up. Had I known, I would’ve had some shame,” Hoffman says.
But Hoffman later received word that the script was read and got an option deal for $1,000. While the project never materialized, this experience led her to being hired as a writers’ assistant on the PBS children’s TV show “Odd Squad.” Hoffman won an Emmy in 2019 for her work writing the series and gained her first experience on a set.
As Hoffman took on more writing jobs for various TV series, she moved to Los Angeles — fulfilling a lifelong dream.
“I had a letter I got to open when I was 18 that I wrote myself when I was 12 … It said that I hope I live in L.A.,” Hoffman recalls. “My father lived in Los Angeles and I always wanted a relationship with him, but for whatever reason he wasn’t able to be in our lives the way that we wanted … I always felt the pull to California and always felt connected to L.A. I got to visit my father once [in L.A.] when I was 15 and it was amazing.”
Hoffman describes “Wake Up” as a culmination of her California dreams. Shot at the Masonic Lodge in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, the new special is the grand statement she wanted her first Netflix special to be.
John Mulaney, who has become one of the most celebrated comedians of the last decade, reached out to Hoffman and asked to direct the special when he heard it was in development. He brought Hoffman on tour with him as an opener and has celebrated her skills as an artist. “Wake Up” even begins with a brief introduction by Mulaney where he describes Hoffman as “a legend at the top of her game.”
“He is literally the definition of a man,” Hoffman says of Mulaney.
Hoffman’s comedy stylings have often been compared to Larry David. With her thick Brooklyn accent and observational material, Hoffman performs like a millennial with the soul of an old man. “I’m funny, but not fun,” she says in “Wake Up.” She is the master of an exclamation and can zero in on her complaints on a topic as wide as all men or as narrow as the decreased use of defibrillators in media.
The special’s title is a reference to an oft-repeated phrase in Hoffman’s material that she addresses directly to the audience. But the comedian also sees the similarity between the title and a common criticism by some high-profile comedians, such as Joe Rogan and Ricky Gervais, in recent years: that people aren’t allowed to say what they want in comedy anymore because of new “woke” standards toward political correctness. “Wake Up” provides a strong counterpoint. Topics covered in the special include pedophiles, sexuality, gender roles and contemporary pronoun use. Hoffman zips through these subjects with ease; she says she doesn’t approach her material as controversial, only as what is currently on her mind.
Speaking on the current comedy climate, Hoffman says, “You can say whatever you want, but be prepared to stand on what you said. Maybe somebody doesn’t like what you said — hell, I’ve experienced that. You can say what you want, but so can other people.”
Instead, Hoffman trusts her audience will come to her. She says she hasn’t found certain audiences more or less receptive to her work in different geographic regions or that her material has been too provocative. “I think I get away with, ‘Well, what are you going to do? It’s Robby Hoffman.’”
But despite her comparisons to pessimistic comedians like Larry David, Hoffman remains an optimist. When discussing the rise of artificial intelligence, which in recent years has been characterized as a major threat to the entertainment industry, Hoffman believes that this moment has the ability to boost human artistry.
“Maybe this is just because I’ve always done better in storms,” Hoffman explains. “But the silver lining I think will be this real push of incredible creative work. Almost like the Renaissance period or another period where humanity faces an existential threat to some extent. It just pushes the best out in terms of creativity in our humanity as if to say, ‘We were here.’”
2025 can be called a momentous year for Hoffman. But she sees the years of dedication she has put into her career as culminating to this point. To her, it’s fortuitous timing so many milestones have occurred in the past 12 months. Everything is the result of work that Hoffman has been doing since she walked out of that CPA program over 10 years ago.
“Almost every year feels momentous,” Hoffman says about her career path. “This feels as momentous as when I got $1,000 for an option of a script.”
And Hoffman still sees the magic in everything. While describing the feeling of shooting the final season of “Hacks” in L.A., she is still in awe of the place she finds herself. “Things don’t get old for me, that’s why I could still have saltines every single day,” Hoffman says. “I love working in L.A., it’s unbelievable: I drive onto the lot … [I see] the palm trees, the gates, the big water tower …Long live the water tower.”
Hoffman’s future is looking as busy as ever. She is finishing filming “Hacks” Season 5, developing a TV show and appearing in a new comedy series from Steve Carell and “Ted Lasso” creator Bill Lawrence — both for HBO — and embarking on a stand-up tour in 2026. But for the comedian, this year does not represent a sudden explosion of success. Instead, this is the year the true size of her audience finally found her.
“I was saying from the beginning, there’s something here. I was the first one saying that. I was saying, ‘I think there’s something with Robby Hoffman.’ But now everybody’s joining me.”
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