If Robby Hoffman, BCom’10, isn’t already one of the hottest stars in the world of comedy, she soon will be.
John Mulaney, one of standup comedy’s leading lights and the director of Hoffman’s recent Netflix special Robby Hoffman: Wake Up, has described her as “one of the funniest people living.” “I agree whole-heartedly [with that],” Will & Grace star Sean Hayes declared when Hoffman appeared on Smartless, the podcast that Hayes co-hosts with Will Arnett and Jason Bateman. The headline for a profile of Hoffman in The New York Times last year was “If You Put Her in a Scene, She Will Steal It.”
In the last few years, Hoffman has received widespread praise for her work in several high-profile comedy shows, including Hacks (she earned an Emmy nomination for that role in 2025), Dying for Sex and Rooster. HBO has given the green light to Unentitled, an upcoming series that Hoffman will co-write, produce and star in (early reports indicate that the show is based on her own life, but Hoffman says she can’t talk about it yet).
“Last week, I was a Hassidic Lubavitch Jew living in Crown Heights, New York. Now I’m in L.A., I’m gay and probably an atheist.” Those were Hoffman’s memorable first lines on Hacks as Randi, a forthright and earnest talent agency assistant new to the ways of Hollywood. Hacks co-creator Paul W. Downs, who became acquainted with Hoffman on the comedy circuit, has said that the character, whose background echoes Hoffman’s, was “written with Robby in mind.”
‘I realized the shame isn’t on me’
Hoffman herself was born in New York, the seventh of 10 children in an ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jewish family. After her parents’ troubled marriage fractured, her mother moved back to her native Montreal with the kids. There wasn’t much money and the family struggled to get by.
“It is extremely embarrassing to be poor,” says Hoffman.
Most of her classmates in school came from families that were considerably more comfortable. “I would lie about [her family’s circumstances],” says Hoffman. “I felt shame about it. The revolution for me, personally, was when I started talking about it openly. I realized the shame isn’t on me, it’s on the [societal] system. It’s on all of us that this is how some people have to live. So now I just talk plainly, and, yes, jokingly about the stuff that affected me, because it turns out that it affects a lot of people.”
Hoffman says her knack for comedy didn’t make her unique in her family.
“Everybody [at home] was funny. Everybody was struggling and everybody was funny. I think it’s obviously a way to cope. Everything [we dealt with] was heartbreaking, but it was funny too.”
Her years at CEGEP were eventful. She moved away from home and began supporting herself. She was outed as gay in circumstances that were not of her choosing (“Basically, I lost all my friends,” she said on the podcast Made It Out). And she turned away from her kosher upbringing, ordering her first Egg McMuffin with extra bacon during Passover.
“On stage, I’m an exaggeration of myself. There’s no decorum. I don’t have any limitations.”
Robby Hoffman
A calculated bet on McGill
Next up was McGill – and she began her studies with a definite goal in mind. She wanted to escape poverty once and for all and she wanted an education that would firmly put her on that path. “I didn’t have a passion for accounting or finance,” Hoffman says of her studies. Her choice of majors was strictly utilitarian.
“McGill had a good reputation and because I was living in Montreal, it was affordable,” says Hoffman. “I look back at those years fondly, but also sadly. I feel I didn’t have the full McGill experience. I was living on my own in Verdun, so I never got to experience dorm life. I didn’t have time for extracurricular [activities]. I was still discovering my sexuality, and I did go to a few Queer McGill events, but I didn’t feel welcomed in a lot of those places because I was studying business. I was seen as ‘working for the man.’ I would have loved to study art history or gender studies, the things these queer people I was meeting were studying, but it didn’t feel practical or responsible. ‘Working for the man’ felt like the only opportunity I had.”
One of Hoffman’s former McGill teachers recognized her spark for comedy. Karl Moore, an associate professor of organization and strategy, wrote about Hoffman for Forbes in 2019. “To this day I still remember her [class] presentation as standing out among that of her cohort and there being a great deal of laughter.”
Hoffman’s plan paid off. She completed her degree and landed a stable job.
“I got paid $32,500 a year, which was incredible. It was everything I ever wanted. I could go grocery shopping once a week. I wasn’t shopping at the depanneur and just buying whatever. But once I wasn’t so desperate anymore, I started to hear this other voice. I was able to think about what I actually wanted to do.” And the thing that kept coming to mind was comedy.
A comedic career change
“Growing up in Montreal, the [Just for Laughs] Festival was there, and stand-up had a bigger presence than it did in maybe another city. I thought, well, I could try that,” recalls Hoffman. “I was immediately pretty good at it. It felt like a natural fit. And then I started to worry – what if this is the thing I’m good at?
“My whole plan was, get a good education, then get a good job and don’t [screw] around,” says Hoffman. “I had [financial] security for the first time in my life and that security meant the world to me. So, jumping into something that felt like it could [lead me back to] poverty again, that was very, very scary, and it took me some time [to make the leap]. I wasn’t quitting my day job, but I kept getting comedy work. I waited to a point of it becoming unbearable to balance both.”
Hoffman put in the hours at comedy clubs, earning the respect of her peers with an approach that blended a deadpan swagger and a touch of grouchiness with a knack for offbeat observational material (comparisons to Larry David come up often). Hoffman mines her own life for her shows, but she also dives into some provocative holy-cow-did-she-just-say-that-out-loud terrain.
“On stage, I’m an exaggeration of myself,” Hoffman says. “If you were in a sound booth and there’s all these levers and you can raise the bass, you can raise the tenor, you can raise everything – when I’m on stage, I’ve raised everything. I’m the concentrated [version] of me. There’s no decorum. I don’t have any limitations. I couldn’t live like that day in and day out – it would be exhausting – but for a little bit of my day, I [can] go max.”
She began working behind the scenes on TV shows, writing for the CBC comedies The Baroness Von Sketch Show and Workin’ Moms and for Odd Squad, an inventive kids show on PBS where young sleuths tackle math-related mysteries (she earned an Emmy for her contributions to Odd Squad). She began musing about how she might fare in front of the cameras.
“For a while I thought somebody should do something with me. Like, put me in, coach. And then they called my bluff.”
‘Somebody who could make something pop’
Her first acting credit was for Dying for Sex. She played a domme instructing Michelle Williams’ character, a dying woman who decides to spend her final months exploring her sexuality, about some of the intricacies of BDSM culture. It is an intense, intimate and surprisingly tender scene that plays an important role for the series as a whole and it paired Hoffman, in her first big acting role, with Williams, a five-time Oscar nominee.
“That was terrifying,” says Hoffman.
Soon after came Hacks. “I had six little scenes [as Randi] and got an Emmy nomination. It really helped solidify my place in acting that I was somebody who could make something pop on your show.”
How closely does Randi resemble Robby?
“I would give it like a solid 20 to 30 per cent,” says Hoffman. “She’s certainly one aspect of me. She’s very eager, nerdy, very dedicated. She’s like me as a McGill student. Robby, in real life, I have more swagger to me. I’m probably a little cooler. I’m not as eager.
“I’m not doing Meryl Streep acting,” Hoffman says. “The characters [I play] are all rooted in me, but some are more serious, some are nerdier. All these roles are in the milieu of Robby Hoffman, but there is some range there.”
Hoffman may have veered far away from the life that she had once hoped her McGill degree would prepare her for, but she says that education still comes in handy at times.
“It is helpful, because you’re an artist, but you’re also now a small business. I have agents, I have a lawyer, I have an assistant. I tour, I have logistics [to keep track of]. We have writing projects, acting projects, we have fittings and shoots. There’s a lot going on. It’s like I’m running a small business. So, [those management courses], it’s not totally wasted.”
At one point during our video conversation, Hoffman pauses to pick up something to show me. It is her framed McGill degree.
“My mother insisted on paying for a proper frame for it,” says Hoffman. “We didn’t splurge on much, but she did splurge on a good frame. And that meant so much to me. I keep it in my office.”
