Ruby Setnik started doing stand-up while still in high school at The Met in Sacramento. Now, eight years later, she’s toured across the country, and was featured by Netflix in a new comic showcase in 2025.
When she first saw an open mic night in Sacramento, she said that she wasn’t impressed with anyone who went up. Setnik thought she could do better.
“The next week, I came back and I did probably worse than everybody who I had seen,” Setnik said. “It’s very hard. But it was exciting to me that it was difficult.”
Now, having toured all over the country, she’s back in Sacramento for a show this Saturday at Punchline Sacramento. She said Sacramento is unique because of just how normal people are here.
“Sacramento isn’t a city that people live in and then brag about living here,” Setnik said. “I think that you figure out Sacramento is a cool city by living here.”
She also said that there’s a spirit of inventiveness in Sacramento, which she thinks is necessitated by the terrain Sacramento sits on. People in a place like hilly San Francisco have everything laid out in front of them.
“They can see the ocean, they can see the trees, they can see the hills, they can see Oakland, they can see the curvature of the Earth,” Setnik said. “In Sacramento, it necessitates that you have the creativity necessary to understand that there’s a river without seeing it at all times.”
After Setnik got her start in stand up in Sacramento, she went to college in Massachusetts at Hampshire College, a school that has an alternative approach to education.
“My bachelor’s at that school was in comedy,” Setnik said. “The school is like you choose your own adventure.”
She filmed a stand-up special as her thesis for her degree that never saw the light of day.
“But that’s classic. So many comedians have the same,” Setnik said. “I spent five grand on something that no one will ever see.”
But to Setnik, it’s all about the process. She said that she’s drawn to the difficulty of stand-up, and she also values the instant feedback you get on stage.
Ruby Setnik performing in Sacramento circa 2019.Courtesy of Ruby Setnik
“Most art can be easy right away and that it’s not obvious whether or not it’s going poorly, and one could do it in the privacy of their own home,” Setnik said. “With stand up, you have an immediacy. Either it works or it doesn’t.”
For Setnik, it’s worked, maybe a bit too well. When she was featured in the Netflix Is A Joke’s “Introducing…” stand-up showcase, it was a hallmark in her career. However, she started to realize that touring and doing shows all the time might not be the best way to live.
“Everything just became a bit too scary for me,” Setnik said. “I was unhealthy in many ways, and I wondered if stand-up was really something that I wanted to choose, or if it was something that I had chosen when I was 18.”
She started to wonder if it’s something she would choose again as a 26-year-old, or if it was only something that she was able to deal with because her brain was still young and malleable. She said that there’s a lot of things that young brains deal with that would be a lot more difficult today.
“When you’re a kid, for example, you lose all of your teeth. Imagine if right now, you lost all of your teeth… and then the tooth fairy gives you a dollar for it,” Setnik said. “You don’t even need psychological counseling. You need like, mysticism and a rumor to recover.”
So, she took about a year off to really try to figure out what she wanted to do. She wanted to get a “normal” job that didn’t involve travelling across the country talking to strangers. Setnik tried to get a job at a grocery store, but she just couldn’t land it. So, she went back to performing.
“The economy is so bad right now that it actually became the financially responsible thing to pursue my dreams,” Setnik said. “Stand-up is what I do… This is the valuable skill I have to offer. Trader Joe’s doesn’t care how many followers I have on Instagram.”
Now, she’s back on tour again. Setnik has a show in Sacramento this Saturday, and in November, she’ll be performing on a comedy cruise with Bert Kreischer—one of the top-grossing stand-up comedians in the world—and a big group of comics she looks up to. However, she’s a little apprehensive about returning to a life on the water.
Setnik said that when the markets crashed in 2009, her parents — her mother, a real estate agent and her father, a contractor — took the hit especially hard. They had to declare bankruptcy and they also got a divorce. Her dad, in response, bought a boat.
“Which is something that a man does both at rock bottom and at the tippy-top of his life,” Setnik said. “When one buys a boat, [it’s] in crisis or celebration. In this case, it was because he couldn’t afford to live on the land anymore.”
So, for a while, Setnik had to live on a boat. She said she has some “bad associations” with boats because of it, but she said she’s excited to be with a bunch of stand-ups all in one place.
“I’m excited about it because you don’t really get to see the comedians that you work with all at once,” Setnik said. “We’re all pretty scattered around the country.”
Setnik will be performing at Punchline Sacramento on Saturday, September 12 and will be touring across the country. You can find tickets at her website.