Comedian Robby Hoffman, One of the Funniest People Living, Interviewed By Her Friend, John Mulaney
This past May, the comedian Robby Hoffman appeared on John Mulaney’s Netflix talk show Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney. Mulaney’s other guests that night included Andy Samberg, Ramy Youssef, and a former TV news anchor named Aixa Diaz, who’s now the media relations manager for AAA, and was there to talk about the night’s preselected topic—the impending national rollout of REAL ID-enhanced drivers’ licenses. (Look, it’s a strange show.) Hoffman entered the stage from the wings, almost like a tearaway audience member who’d been chased into the frame, and within seconds of sitting down, she’d blasted REAL ID as a money-grab by AAA; she later characterized it as “an attack on the poor, like everything else is.”
From there, Hoffman was off and running. She hit her vape while Mulaney took a viewer call, passed it to Samberg (who gamely puffed), offered it to Diaz (who politely declined, even after Hoffman explained, as if to convince her to reconsider, that “It’s not nicotine”), weighed in on highway safety (“If you have a motorcycle—which, you know, good luck to you, rest in peace…it’s not if, it’s when”), and tried repeatedly to start some shit with Mulaney’s genial announcer/sidekick Richard Kind. Finally, to illustrate an anecdote about walking on the armrests of her airplane seat to exit her row without disturbing a sleeping passenger (“Gabby”—reality-TV personality Gabby Windey, who became Hoffman’s wife earlier this year—“was like, ‘You can’t just walk over people,’” Hoffman recalled. “I said, ‘But I should wake them from a slumber?’”), she clambered up onto the arms of Mulaney’s couch, giant-stepped over Youssef as well as Mulaney himself, jumped off Mulaney’s chair, and stuck the landing, to applause.
Even by the standards of Everybody’s Live—a sometimes very loose take on talk-show conventions, a show whose whole premise is about hanging out in the gray area between neighborhood-public-access weirdness and actual chaos—this was an electric, wide-open couple of minutes, in which Hoffman, a comedian only slightly more famous than the spokesperson for AAA, became the focus and the revving engine of the entire segment just by being seemingly incapable of saying or doing anything false or boring (and performing a feat of physical agility.)
Hoffman—who you may have seen playing a version of herself as an eccentric talent-agency assistant last season on HBO’s Hacks—was born in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, grew up in Montreal as one of ten children raised by a single mother, and began doing comedy when she was 18 after briefly pursuing a career in accounting. As a standup, she bites off observational punchlines (about everything from dried apricots to being a poor kid who wore Shaqs instead of Jordans) in a Brooklyn accent straight out of a Safdie Brothers movie, rolling from one provocation to the next with pugnacious glee.
John Mulaney went on to direct Hoffman’s new special, Wake Up, which premieres on Netflix this Sunday, and volunteered to conduct this interview with Hoffman, which took place before a show in Detroit this past weekend. The questions in this Q&A are Mulaney’s own, except the ones read by Mulaney’s assistant Blake, which were from a list supplied by GQ at Mulaney’s request, in case he and Hoffman found themselves with nothing to talk about. It will surprise no one who’s seen Hoffman work that this did not turn out to be an issue.
Part I (I Live With Animals, Please Help)
John Mulaney: If you open a water bottle and you don’t hear a crack, do you still drink it?
