Technically Funny: Samantha Ruddy

SAMANTHA RUDDY: T E C H N I C A L LY F U N N Y

The life of a modern comic

BY: BARBARA BROOKS S amantha Ruddy ’13 is one of Brooklyn’s funniest people— and, in a borough where countless aspiring comics jockey for attention, that’s saying a lot. Brooklyn Magazine gave Ruddy that nod in 2016, just two years after she began performing standup comedy at clubs around New York City and across the country—and three years after she left Syracuse University with stage presence, contacts in the field, and technical skills that could help her succeed.

Now 27, Ruddy has already performed at the New York Comedy Festival, San Francisco Sketchfest, and Boston’s Women in Comedy Festival. She is represented by the William Morris Agency, and last year she headlined at Caroline’s on Broadway. In October, she got another huge break: She recorded a segment for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Ruddy said she draws much of her material from living in New York—“an insane place where streets are spilling over with people and objects and everyone’s on top of each other. Funny things happen all the time.”

tMy friend was bragging to me about how her apartment in Wisconsin has a porch. She said it was nice to have a place to take your shoes off, play some music, and have a drink. She was like “you don’t have anything like that here in NYC.” I was like “Duh the subway.”

Over the years, Ruddy has built 45–60 minutes of material that she considers “really solid.” She maintains a “giant database” of every joke she’s written since 2013 and, with skills in HTML, CSS and basic Java Script, she built and maintains her own website. People reach out to her by email and Facebook for bookings. And she tests the seeds of her jokes on Twitter (@samlymatters), where she also offers a

steady stream of promotions for her upcoming shows. She also promotes her fellow comics and pokes kind-hearted fun at her family, her friends, and her home state of Pennsylvania.

tPennsylvania has the Hershey chocolate factory and the Crayola crayon factory. We’re like the number one exporter of stuff you don’t want your dog to eat.

“I was obsessed with social media in college,” Ruddy said, “and now it’s a big part of me gaining traction as a comic. When I had 5,000 followers, if 20 people favorited or shared a Tweet, I figured the joke had merit.” Now, with 22,000 followers, she shoots for 100 or more signs of encouragement. Her jokes are usually clean though a bit dark; often self-deprecating and sometimes genderrelated. As an openly gay woman with a long-term partner who lives in New York, she takes extra care to be broadly relatable.

tI know I’m in love because I deleted all my dating apps. Well except farmers only—but that’s just so when I leave the door open and my girlfriend asks if we live in a barn, I can say “maybe me and my next girlfriend do.”

Ruddy said that “one-linery misdirections” are at the heart of her comedy. “I think of a common occurrence and then I twist it.”

tMy friend wasn’t even drunk, and he got arrested at a DUI checkpoint. In fairness, though, he had no business conducting a fake DUI checkpoint.

“It’s really hard to write comedy that isn’t a little bit dark,” she said. “People are exhausted by politics, but comedy has to be relevant.”

tStandup is a weird job because what we feel is acceptable as a society changes so rapidly. No accountant is ever like “well I looked at some tax returns I did back in 2013 and uh turns out they were super racist.”

For her Colbert set, Ruddy prepared six minutes of her best material. She said, “It was so scary. It was so cool. I woke up and went and got my hair done. They picked me up in a car and gave me a swag bag. I have so much stuff, I look like I got drafted by Stephen Colbert.”

Once in the green room, she got the royal treatment. “There was all this great food, but I couldn’t eat it I was so nervous. I had them get me some whiskey to chill my jitters, but as soon as I was on stage, I was fine.” For that performance, especially, she kept the material free of politics and major brands. For example, she saved this jab for other occasions:

tThis morning I stood in the Chickfil-a line behind an immigrant in a MAGA hat and part of me was like “why would you support something that’s so against your own interest?” and then I remembered I was a gay person in line for Chick-fil-a.

As a kid, Ruddy was funny. She was voted Class Clown in high school. “I had friends,” she said. “I wasn’t a loser, but I wasn’t super popular either. I just wanted to make people laugh. My grades were decent, but I got really obsessed with the SAT. I knew that was the ticket to going to a good college.”

She entered Syracuse’s iSchool / Newhouse dual major program with dreams of becoming a writer for television. “Freshman year, I was definitely lonely,” she recalled. “I tried on some weird friend groups, but when I started doing sketch comedy, I found my people.” After spending “more time behind a video camera than writing and performing jokes,” she decided to drop the Newhouse part of her major and focus on comedy and on learning the business and technology skills she was most likely to need to succeed— especially web development with Adjunct Professor Chris Kirkegaard, and social media elements with Associate Professor of Practice Jeff Rubin. “I was so into the iSchool, that I had finished all the requirements by junior year.”

Outside the classroom, she performed with a sketch comedy group called Humor Whore, and by junior year, she was writing and acting. By senior year, she was co-head writer with Newhouse student Mike Rogers ’14, who went on to work at Nickelodeon. “We filmed something every weekend,” she said. “Our sketches were all on the Internet.” Their most popular video caught fire with Syracuse alumni and attracted 100,000 views.

Ruddy graduated early from the iSchool. She moved first to Boulder, Colorado, and then to Brooklyn to launch her career. David Rosen ’11 G’12, now a senior solutions architect at CrowdTwist, Inc., in New York, helped her get her foot in the door at Oracle, where he worked at the time. She also picked up gigs as a social media manager and doing data entry. “In comedy, you have really great months, and then times when you need to temp,” she said.

These days, she performs an average of a show a night—about 365 shows a year—with other rising stars. On Wednesdays, she’s at Lucky Jacks in Manhattan with the group “Too Many Cooks.” She also takes occasional writing gigs, such as when a friend needed a funny subcontractor to help meet a deadline for an awards show. About once a month, she travels to smaller markets such as Minneapolis, Denver, Boston, Omaha and Atlanta. Success is clearly building, as Ruddy plugs away, one joke, one gig, one cup of coffee, at a time.

tCool thing about being a woman: A female barista kept making me the wrong drink (hot instead of cold, tea instead of coffee, etc.) and instead of either of us getting mad we just kept apologizing to each other and now I have 3 drinks.

In the near term, she hopes to secure a job writing monologue jokes for a late-night show or for a sitcom. But the big payoff would be to tour the country full-time, as a headlining comedian. So, every day, she works at her craft. “I’m walking around and think of something, so I write it down. But once a week I force myself to sit down to write for an hour or more,” she said. “Even if I think it’s bad, I’m better for having done it.”