Credit: NPR
Comedian Robby Hoffman says she’s still figuring out what topics, if any, are “off limits” in her work.
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But what remains solidly in-bounds is centering her experiences with abject candor, even if it means taking a call in the middle of a recorded interview.
“Let me pick up, because what if it’s something crazy?” she asked during a recent conversation for NPR’s podcast at The Comedy Store in Los Angeles.
“So, it wasn’t a tampon?” Hoffman asked her landlord, who had called to report that a pipe was now cleared at the home she shares with wife and reality TV star Gabby Windey.
“I am not the one flushing tampons,” Hoffman declared to host Juana Summers after the call wrapped, “for the record.”
With her heavy Brooklyn accent and a no-holds-barred approach to comedy, Hoffman seems to be everywhere these days – from scene-stealing roles in the Emmy-nominated shows like to her most recent Netflix special, .
But she’s also taken heat for some of her remarks, including lengthy jokes about the non-binary community and dismissing the use of they/them pronouns.
“I like to cope and explore through jokes, and I feel like. I should be more able to do that than, say, some of my counterparts,” Hoffman, 36, told NPR’s Juana Summers in an interview for NPR’s video podcast. “I feel like if I can’t talk about it, who can?”
Hoffman, who described herself as “somebody who’s clearly in the queer space, who cut my tits off, who could be they/them at the drop of a hat,” pushed back at critics who suggest that her jokes about the topic could be dangerous.
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“I think it’s fair if they’re mad about it. I also think it’s fair for many of us to laugh at it. And I feel like I want to talk to the stuff that I know and experience day-to-day,” she said.
Including her day-to-day life, Hoffman’s comedy draws on her upbringing. She made her way from a Hasidic community in Crown Heights – where she was one of ten siblings – to Montreal, where she eventually hit the stand-up circuit. Summers asked Hoffman about her first stand-up performance, which she described as “brutal.”
“I went to a club where I was living,” Hoffman recounted. “I said ‘Where is the best place to bomb?'”
Though she only made it through a single minute of her five-minute set, Hoffman decided to keep trying.
“It was good, even the one minute I did,” she told Summers.
From there, Hoffman went on to bigger venues across the U.S., eventually earning breakout roles on multiple Emmy-nominated shows. On top of , she’s appeared in HBO’s and Hulu’s
“I’ve never been the overnight sensation, overnight success,” she said. “I’ve always been the slow and steady, just keep at it,” she said, crediting much of her tenacity to her mother, who Hoffman says set an example by going back to school after moving the family to Canada as a single parent.
“Rain or shine, she was there in the worst circumstances.”
Hoffman declined to share too many details about what’s next in her career, explaining, “I don’t like to jinx anything.” But she was vocally grateful for her success, and didn’t rule out a desire to helm a late night show, despite the recent political pressures on other hosts in that arena.
“I’d be excellent,” Hoffman said. “Call me.”
You can watch the full episode of NPR’s by playing the video above, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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