Appearing as a guest on Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney—Mulaney’s dryly absurdist, essentially experimental late-night Netflix series—is not for the faint of heart. Robby Hoffman, however, carried it off like a pro.
On a recent episode titled “Are You Ready for Real ID?,” the 35-year-old comedian stole the show. Wearing her signature wire-rimmed glasses, button-down shirt over a white tee, and low, carefully slicked-back bun, she generously procured a vape from her pocket to share with Andy Samberg; displayed her catlike ability to steal out of an airplane seat without disturbing her neighbors; and pointedly referred to the government’s new ID requirements for domestic travel as “an attack on the poor, like everything else is.” (Her argument: “Who has passports? Wealthier people. The poorest people don’t have ID.”)
From some Los Angeles-based alt comedians, the latter might sound like a bid for socialist cred. But as the seventh of 10 children raised by a single mother, Hoffman knows what she’s talking about. “We had nothing,” Hoffman tells me plainly, describing her Hasidic Jewish childhood in Brooklyn and, later, Montreal. “But my mom’s taste in culture and art and movies was phenomenal. We watched everything: Spike Lee, Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand.”
The two of us are making our way around the roughly two-mile loop of the Silver Lake Reservoir, not far from where Hoffman lives with her wife of roughly five months, The Bachelorette, Dancing with the Stars, and The Traitors star Gabby Windey. (Hoffman jokingly complains to me about Windey’s need to live in a walkable neighborhood where she can “go out and grab a little coffee for nine dollars,” even after Hoffman got her a Breville espresso maker for Christmas.)
Growing up, Hoffman didn’t regard comedy as a viable life path; she went to McGill to study accounting. “I was like, I can’t just be going to school willy-nilly. No theater degree for me. I need to go into something where I can pay this money back,” she says. “I moved out at 17 and needed to start working as soon as possible, and I was told that in accounting you’d get a paid summer internship and be given a laptop for keeps, so I was in. Before that, I was printing at the library.”
After being turned on to stand-up in Montreal, however, Hoffman went on to headline the New York Comedy Festival in 2018 and record her first one-hour special, I’m Nervous, the year after. When she’s onstage bemoaning kids riding skateboards without helmets or inveighing against the subpar quality of the food at Disneyland, she can sound like a sapphically inclined Larry David, a comparison she has definitely gotten before. Yet Hoffman has also brought her voice to TV writers’ rooms (most notably for The Chris Gethard Show, Baroness Von Sketch Show, and Workin’ Moms), finding that the two worlds complement each other: “If I do stand-up and then go into a writer’s room the next day, I’m sharper and my jokes on the page are better,” she says.
Now about a decade into her comedy career, Hoffman is seeing the fruits of her labor pay off with on-camera roles on two of the most buzzed-about TV shows of 2025. While on the HBO series Hacks, Hoffman plays Randi, a ballsy-yet-eager-to-please ex-Hasidic lesbian assistant (the role was written for her), on Hulu’s Dying for Sex, she got to instruct Michelle Williams’s character Molly in the art of BDSM. “I take my work seriously, and the Dying for Sex role was very serious,” Hoffman tells me. “On my first day, I had to do that scene where I’m holding Michelle Williams. Just another day at the office!”
But arcs in prestiege comedies are far from the only thing occupying Hoffman’s time right now. She and Windey are enjoying settling into their life as a married couple, and getting closer to each other’s families: “Gabby is so cute. She gets so much free shit, like cosmetics and stuff. My little sister is currently staying on our couch, and she already texted me, ‘I’m so excited to use Gabby’s masks.’ Gabby just naturally thinks of that stuff.”
They’re also planning a future on their own terms. For now, they do not plan to have kids; as Hoffman puts it, “We want to be each other’s babies forever. We want to heal through each other and with each other. When my brothers and I would fight growing up, my mother would always say, ‘You don’t choose your family,’ but marriage is the one loophole to that.”
In their downtime, Hoffman and Windey are big fans of visiting LA’s many Korean spas, and they favor old-Hollywood haunts like Musso Frank or Taix for date nights. As Hoffman tells me about bringing Windey to visit her mother in Regina, Saskatchewan, she pauses to amusedly note the city’s correct pronunciation: It rhymes with “vagina,” in case you were unsure.
She can’t help this kind of thing. “Whether it’s a highbrow thing or lowbrow,” Hoffman says, “I’m never, ever going to leave a joke on the floor.”
