Robby Hoffman Will Always Feel Poor, No Matter How Rich She Gets

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**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (0:37)
From The New York Times, this is the interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro.
Comedian Robby Hoffman seems to be everywhere these days. She's been praised for her scene stealing roles in Hacks as Randy, a former Hasidic Jew from Crown Heights who becomes a Hollywood assistant, and in Steve Carell's HBO comedy Rooster, in which she plays a blunt protective roommate. Hoffman grew up poor in a Hasidic community herself, the seventh of 10 children with lots of trauma. Despite their religious roots, her family supported her when she was outed in her teens. That life is the source of a lot of her unfiltered comedy, including her Netflix special, Wake Up. There's so much I wanted to ask her about, money, fame, marriage, and what they mean in our celebrity and wealth-obsessed culture. And boy, did she engage.
Here's my conversation with the singular Robby Hoffman.

**Robby Hoffman** (1:40)
Okay, an action.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (1:42)
Robby Hoffman.

**Robby Hoffman** (1:43)
Yeah, can you imagine?

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (1:44)
We're actually in your home.

**Robby Hoffman** (1:46)
It's weird because you guys said, and I was saying this a bit, you said, oh, they have to do it at your house because we want the person to be comfortable. But what you do is you come to the house and you totally rip apart. Like, this is not like, do you know what I mean? It's like, you want me to be comfortable, but the couch isn't where the couch, like the whole house is moved.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (2:05)
Yes.

**Robby Hoffman** (2:06)
So it's kind of counterintuitive.
We want the subject to be comfortable, but then you come in the house and you move everything that's good, right? And I did notice sometimes when you see an interview, you see them sitting in the middle of a room in their chair, and I go, that's their living room? How weird to walk in, but now I understand they move everything. I have these chairs, these are my chairs, but normally they're there.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (2:25)
They're very nice chairs.

**Robby Hoffman** (2:26)
They're very nice chairs.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (2:27)
The house is beautiful.

**Robby Hoffman** (2:28)
They're beautiful.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (2:29)
Do you feel comfortable?

**Robby Hoffman** (2:32)
No. But I'm not comfortable a lot. So don't worry. I'm comfortable being uncomfortable.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (2:40)
Are you comfortable making people uncomfortable too?

**Robby Hoffman** (2:42)
Yeah. Oh yeah.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (2:45)
Great. Then we're in for a fun conversation.

**Robby Hoffman** (2:48)
We're in for it.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (2:49)
All right. So we're going to talk about more of this later, but as you have often talked about, you grew up really poor.
And I wanted to start though with, what is the weirdest thing now about finding yourself with money and fame?

**Robby Hoffman** (3:06)
You know, I don't know if weird is the word. I think it's tremendous. It's amazing. It's everything I've ever wanted was to make a living doing what I love doing.
You know, life is weird everywhere. My weird doesn't, you know, me seeing stuff, it doesn't change necessarily based on my socioeconomic status because I still see everything. Now I just see rich people and their weirdness. I was poor. I saw us. You know what I mean? And I saw that now I see new weird things. You know, it's like you go to a different level of a video game. There's other challenges and there's other weirdness.

**Lulu Garcia Navarro** (3:46)
How would you compare the rich weird to the poor weird?

**Robby Hoffman** (3:49)
The rich weird is way weirder and worse because there's like a humanity that is missing. My favorite is the people like me who grew up poor and then by the grace of God got some money. And now we could be like, oh my God, how weird are these rich people who've been like this since birth or whatever, right? Small things like when you go into a rich person's house and nobody's allowed to go in the fridge, right? The poor have much less, but it's like when you go to their house, it's like, take, take, take, you want a Coke? You want a Sprite? We just, everybody went in the fridge, but the rich, they have the biggest fridge, but nobody can go in the fridge, right? So it's a small thing like that, that paints a bigger picture, a bigger problem of generosity, right? Generosity seems like a small thing, but I've mostly seen generosity in poor households.