Robby Hoffman

Crown Heights, then Montreal

Robby Hoffman was born Rivkah Sarah Hoffman on 2 December 1989 in Brooklyn, and grew up in the Lubavitch Hasidic community of Crown Heights as one of ten children. Her parents divorced, and her mother — originally from Montreal — eventually took the family north to the city she came from. Hoffman has been direct about what the household was like, describing to NPR in September 2026 the poverty of it, the roaches in the home, and the distance between the rules she was raised inside and the person she turned out to be.

Montreal is where the comedy started, by an unglamorous route. She studied at McGill, worked as an accountant, and found the Just For Laughs festival on her doorstep. Her first attempt at stand-up in the city lasted about a minute before the host took the microphone off her. She went back the following week, and kept going back.

A great deal of what she does on stage comes out of that distance. She is openly lesbian, has spoken publicly about her elective mastectomy, and presents a deliberately androgynous figure — all of it material, none of it handled as confession. The Crown Heights childhood is not a tragic backstory in her act so much as a supply line: the rules, the siblings, the money that was not there.

The writing-room decade

The writing came first and came quickly. Roughly two weeks into performing, she wrote a pilot for HBO Canada that was optioned for a thousand dollars — enough to get her representation and, by around 2015, paid work. Toronto became the base where the act was actually built, while the credits stacked up behind the scenes: Baroness von Sketch Show, Workin' Moms, The Chris Gethard Show, and the PBS children's series Odd Squad, which won her a Daytime Emmy for outstanding writing in 2019.

Her first hour, I'm Nervous, arrived the same year and went out on Crave in Canada rather than a US platform, which is part of why the American audience came to her late. By late 2023 she had a second front: Too Far, the podcast she co-hosts with Rachel Kaly, two queer Jewish comedians working through whatever is in front of them, which the New York Times called an addictive listen. An autobiographical series called Rivkah, drawn from the Crown Heights childhood, has sat in development at Showtime.

That decade of service work explains the discipline underneath a style that sounds as though it has no brakes. Hoffman spent years making other people's shows function — sketch, sitcom, children's television with a mathematics curriculum attached — before her own name was the one selling the tickets.

Randi, and the change of scale

What changed the scale was a small part. Hoffman joined the fourth season of Hacks as Randi, an assistant, and the role was nominated for outstanding guest actress in a comedy series at the 2025 Emmys. The New York Times called her a breakout star and has described her elsewhere as a bulldozing stand-up; Variety named her one of its ten comics to watch for 2025. Screen work followed fast: the limited series Dying for Sex opposite Michelle Williams, and a starring role in the HBO comedy Rooster alongside Steve Carell.

Randi worked because the part was small enough to steal, and Hoffman has said she could see what it might become before anyone else did. Speaking to Bustle on 9 April 2026, the day the fifth and final season of Hacks landed, she put it as: 'I always was saying, I think there's something here.' The nomination is still the line venues lead with when they advertise her.

Hacks finishing in 2026 removed the scaffolding at exactly the point she no longer needed it. The stand-up had already moved out of clubs.

Wake Up, and the argument about it

Wake Up, her debut Netflix special, premiered on 14 December 2025, directed by John Mulaney. It is the record of the act as it currently runs: dense, abrasive by design, built on provocation and the inversion of things an audience assumes are settled, rather than on observational warmth. Nothing in the staging competes with the performer.

The reaction split. Nick Venable at CinemaBlend wrote on 22 December 2025 that the special made him laugh harder than anything else on television that year, with a blunt warning about how explicit it is. The IMDb user score has settled at around 6.1, which is the arithmetic of a comic people either take whole or refuse outright.

Set the two hours side by side and the progress is measurable. I'm Nervous in 2019 already had the aggrieved posture and the gasp-timed punchlines; Wake Up has them under control. The sharper argument is about subject matter. Her material on nonbinary pronouns has drawn real criticism, and she addressed it with NPR's Juana Summers in an interview published on 3 September 2026, arguing that her own queerness is what licenses the exploration: 'I feel like if I can't talk about it, who can?' Critics quoted in the same piece hold that the jokes do damage regardless of who tells them. She has not dropped the bit.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

At 36 she is working on every front at once. She is writing, executive producing and starring in a new HBO comedy, Unentitled. Rooster and Dying for Sex are out. The Netflix hour is the calling card, and the touring has become the main engine rather than a sideline to the screen work.

She married the Bachelorette alumna Gabby Windey in January 2025 and marked the first anniversary around April 2026, when Windey was hosting Love Overboard; as with everything else in her life, the marriage has gone straight into the act.

What she has not done is moderate. The NPR interview is the clearest statement of the position: she treats her own identity as the licence to work the ground next to it, and is unbothered by people who would rather she did not. Whether that holds as the rooms get bigger is the open question of the next two years.

The routing

The current run is billed plainly as Robby Hoffman: Live on Tour, routed through theatres and ballrooms in the several-hundred to low-thousands range — Guild Hall in East Hampton, Turner Hall Ballroom in Milwaukee, the Egg in Albany, the Ridgefield Playhouse. Demand is running ahead of capacity in places: the Guild Hall date on 27 September 2026 sold out in advance, leaving a standby queue and twenty-five-dollar rush tickets released twenty minutes before the start. Roughly twenty-one dates are on sale at once, which for a comic whose first hour went out on a Canadian streaming service in 2019 is a steep curve.

The footprint is widening. On 1 October 2026 a first Australia and New Zealand run was announced for early 2027 through TEG Dainty: the Q Theatre in Auckland on 29 January, the Powerhouse in Brisbane on 30 January, the Factory Theatre in Sydney on 5 February and the National Theatre in Melbourne on 6 February. Those will be the first real test of the act away from North America.