There’s no one else in the world who can do what Robby Hoffman does. The 35-year-old comedian is formerly Hasidic and currently gay, genderqueer and married to reality TV star Gabby Windey, and all of that has deeply informed her comedic voice. Between her piercing, no-holds-barred stand-up sets and various podcasts and interviews, it’s clear that there is little difference between her onstage and off-stage personas; everywhere she goes, Robby Hoffman is simply very Jewish, very gay and very honest.
So why mess with success? Robby is in the newest season of “Hacks,” and after last night’s premiere, it’s evident that she is basically playing herself. In episode two, as agents Kayla (Megan Stalter) and Jimmy (Paul W. Downs) are trying to get their talent agency off the ground, Kayla hires an assistant. Enter: Randi (Robby Hoffman). When Jimmy asks Randi, who dons Robby’s trademark glasses, slicked back bun and quirks of speech, what her job was before this, she responds, “Me, I never been nowhere. Last week I was a Hasidic Lubavitch Jew living in Crown Heights, New York. Now I’m in L.A., I’m gay and probably an atheist.”
Sound familiar?!
“One of the joys of making the show is getting to put people that we just think are so funny into the ‘Hacks’ world,” Jen Statsky, a co-creator and showrunner of “Hacks” said in a featurette for the episode. “Robby is the stand-up that we had been fans of for many years now and then the idea of Robby with Meg and Paul is like, yeah, that’ll work.”
Co-creator Paul W. Downs added, “It is a perfect triumvirate of weirdos.”
It’s this weirdness and radical honesty, both pulled directly from Robby’s own personality, that make Randi an absolute scene-stealer. In Jimmy and Randi’s conversation, the ex-Hasid divulges that she had never seen a movie until last week. The movie in question? 1994’s “Speed.” “We really should sign Sandra Bullock,” Randi suggests emphatically, before also suggesting that Jimmy find his own assistant by asking people how many peanut M&M’s they can fit into a Honda Civic.
Later, Randi interrupts Jimmy and Kayla to tell them that she needs another sink to keep kosher, even though she might be an atheist now. “Kosher living is just cleaner,” she explains. “I mean, some of these religious tenets, they were right. I can’t help that.” She then tells Jimmy she’ll send him sink options because she’s “easy.”
Baruch Hashem for Robby Hoffman! Here’s hoping this season will show Randi interacting with Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and riffing on Kayla’s non-Jewish bat mitzvah.
