Robby Hoffman Drops Limited-Edition Vinyl of Her Latest Comedy Special ‘Wake Up’

By Elisabeth Garber-Paul

Elisabeth Garber-Paul

“It’s that old trope, that musicians want to be comedians, and comedians want to be rock stars,” Robby Hoffman says. 

We’re talking about her comedy special, Robby Hoffman: Wake Up, which was produced by John Mulaney and was a breakout hit on Netflix when it aired in December 2025. Today, it also drops as an album from the legendary indie label Secretly Canadian, available in digital format as well as a limited run of signed vinyl. (Find out where to order here.) 

For a diminutive Jewish dyke (her word) from Montreal, Hoffman has an ineffable swagger — it’s something in the incongruity of how she looks, paired with her jokes dressing down children, pedophiles, and the Brooklyn straights who use they/them pronouns. “I come out very rock star-like. It’s almost like this old Andrew Dice Clay way of doing comedy. [On tour,] I’m in a lot of historic music venues, and we’re bringing the house down with comedy instead of music. Our fandoms have really collided.”

So it makes sense, then, that Hoffman is releasing her first album. “You always see those pictures of artists signing shit,” she says. “They want me to do that now, so I’m gonna do that. I’ll take a picture.”

Hoffman’s rise to fame has been “slow and steady,” says the comedian, 36. “I know everybody wants to pop off right away. For me, I was always doing this for love or money. This is how I toil.” She started with four-minute stints on Toronto comedy club stages, working her way up to short specials on Netflix. Then came scene-stealing roles in Hacks (which earned her an Outstanding Guest Actress Emmy nomination earlier this year), Dying for Sex, and Rooster, and now she’s selling out venues across the globe. “I’ve been moving from smaller venues to bigger venues,” she says. “I was, for a very long time, ‘If you knew, you knew.’ Now I’m like, ‘You have to know.”

In the press release for the album, Hoffman jokes that putting out a physical album is the only way her mother will finally hear the special. In reality, Hoffman’s interest in comedy records came almost entirely from her. “My mother, who’s a musician and avid record [collector], she probably has 10,000 records,” Hoffman says. When she got started in comedy about a decade ago, her mother started sending her comedy records. Now, the comedian makes sure to hit record stores in the towns where she tours. So far, she’s got about 50, which she shows off via Zoom. “She’s been sending me [George] Carlin and Joan Rivers,” she says, flipping through. “These are a lot of Carlin.” She pauses and makes a little grimace, pulling out another album. “But I have Bill Cosby.”

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She launches into a bit about how her mother doesn’t have a conception of “art vs. artist” — “What’s the problem with Cosby?” she says in a perfect Borscht Belt lilt, imitating her mother. “Suddenly, there’s a problem with Cosby?” Her mother, she says, doesn’t pay attention to pop culture enough to know anything about the people who make the art. “She just knows the work,” she says. “It’s actually a great way to live.” It’s classic Hoffman — a little aggressive, a little nervous, a little anachronistic, a throwback to a comedy era where someone with her personal bio very likely would not have been welcomed into the fold. (“I’m somewhere between seven years old and 73,” Hoffman says.)

Hoffman was born in Brooklyn, one of 10 children in an ultraorthodox Jewish community, and raised in Montreal after her Canadian mother extracted the family. “We grew up poor with a lot of records and a lot of books, and that was really it,” she says. “When I got into comedy, she would be like, ‘Oh, you should listen to Lenny Bruce, Jackie Mason,’” Hoffman remembers. “And I used to think those people were hacks. But then I went back. I’m like, ‘These guys are fucking awesome. She’s totally right.’” Now, when Hoffman goes home to visit, the two listen to them together. “She goes, ‘Let me just put it on,’ and we are laughing. We are laughing.”

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Though Wake Up has been streaming on Netflix for over six months, it’s this kind of intimate experience she hopes people will get by listening in an audio-only medium. “There’s a tactileness to sound, the cracking of it. It makes it more tangible,” Hoffman says. “You’re looking at the other person you’re listening to it [with]. If you’re listening to a record communally, or in my case with my mother, you’re laughing. You’re looking at her, laughing, watching me, we hear the crackling of the record. It fills the room in a way that contemporary media just hasn’t nailed.”

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