Robby Hoffman says her comedy started the moment she was 14 and heard Jay Leno land a joke. “I do remember being 14 and catching Jay Leno, and I ‘got’ a joke,” she said, describing it as the instant “I had entered a new portal of understanding.”
That moment helped set off a path that took Hoffman from a conservative Hasidic community in Brooklyn to Montreal, where her mother brought the family after leaving what she called “a pretty oppressive religious community.” She later tried stand-up on a whim after a brief stint as an accountant, a move that looks more deliberate in hindsight than it did at the time. “I never dreamed of doing anything besides maybe getting a good job where I wouldn’t be poor anymore,” she said.
Hoffman has since built a career that cuts across writing, comedy and acting. She won one Emmy for her work on PBS’s Odd Squad, appeared on Hacks as the assistant to Megan Stalter’s and Paul W. Downs’s characters, and is now introducing her debut Netflix comedy special, Robby Hoffman: Wake Up. The profile lands in Harper’s Bazaar’s April issue, part of the publication’s 2026 Now issue context, and presents her as a performer with a voice that arrived fully formed.
Montreal mattered to that arc. Hoffman said the city had the Just for Laughs comedy festival, and she walked into a club with a question that sounds like a dare: “Where’s the best place to bomb?” Her first attempt came at a loft she described as “some dude’s house” with friends in the room. “It felt totally natural,” she said.
That instinct still drives her work. Hoffman said her process is to go out with whatever she thinks is funny. “If I think it’s funny, then that’s all I need,” she said, adding that the discipline to keep working comes from passion. She also said a run of national shocks shaped her outlook: 9/11 happened when she was a kid, she graduated and then the financial crisis hit, and then, in her words, Trump happened. “It would feel weird to me to do comedy in a good time,” she said, and that may be the clearest explanation for why her material feels so locked to the rough edges of the present.
The special arrives with a career already marked by unlikely turns, but Hoffman’s answer to how it all began is disarmingly simple: she saw a joke, understood it, and kept going. That is the through line of Robby Hoffman’s story, from Brooklyn to Montreal to Netflix, and it is why her rise feels less like reinvention than recognition.
