Ruby Setnik started doing stand-up while still in high school at The Met in Sacramento. Now, eight years later, she\u2019s toured across the country, and was featured by Netflix in a new comic showcase in 2025.<\/p>\n
When she first saw an open mic night in Sacramento, she said that she wasn\u2019t impressed with anyone who went up. Setnik thought she could do better.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe next week, I came back and I did probably worse than everybody who I had seen,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cIt\u2019s very hard. But it was exciting to me that it was difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, having toured all over the country, she\u2019s back in Sacramento for a show this Saturday at Punchline Sacramento. She said Sacramento is unique because of just how normal people are here.<\/p>\n
\u201cSacramento isn\u2019t a city that people live in and then brag about living here,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cI think that you figure out Sacramento is a cool city by living here.\u201d<\/p>\n
She also said that there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey 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,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cIn Sacramento, it necessitates that you have the creativity necessary to understand that there\u2019s a river without seeing it at all times.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy bachelor\u2019s at that school was in comedy,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cThe school is like you choose your own adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n
She filmed a stand-up special as her thesis for her degree that never saw the light of day. <\/p>\n
\u201cBut that\u2019s classic. So many comedians have the same,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cI spent five grand on something that no one will ever see.\u201d<\/p>\n
But to Setnik, it’s all about the process. She said that she\u2019s drawn to the difficulty of stand-up, and she also values the instant feedback you get on stage.<\/p>\n
![\"setnik\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/50748256_801030750237608_6467448508361211904_n.jpg\")
Ruby Setnik performing in Sacramento circa 2019.Courtesy of Ruby Setnik
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\u201cMost art can be easy right away and that it\u2019s not obvious whether or not it\u2019s going poorly, and one could do it in the privacy of their own home,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cWith stand up, you have an immediacy. Either it works or it doesn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Setnik, it\u2019s worked, maybe a bit too well. When she was featured in the Netflix Is A Joke\u2019s \u201cIntroducing\u2026\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything just became a bit too scary for me,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
She started to wonder if it\u2019s 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\u2019s a lot of things that young brains deal with that would be a lot more difficult today. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019re a kid, for example, you lose all of your teeth. Imagine if right now, you lost all of your teeth\u2026 and then the tooth fairy gives you a dollar for it,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cYou don\u2019t even need psychological counseling. You need like, mysticism and a rumor to recover.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, she took about a year off to really try to figure out what she wanted to do. She wanted to get a \u201cnormal\u201d job that didn\u2019t involve travelling across the country talking to strangers. Setnik tried to get a job at a grocery store, but she just couldn\u2019t land it. So, she went back to performing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe economy is so bad right now that it actually became the financially responsible thing to pursue my dreams,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cStand-up is what I do\u2026 This is the valuable skill I have to offer. Trader Joe\u2019s doesn\u2019t care how many followers I have on Instagram.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, she\u2019s back on tour again. Setnik has a show in Sacramento this Saturday, and in November, she\u2019ll be performing on a comedy cruise with Bert Kreischer\u2014one of the top-grossing stand-up comedians in the world\u2014and a big group of comics she looks up to. However, she\u2019s a little apprehensive about returning to a life on the water.<\/p>\n
Setnik said that when the markets crashed in 2009, her parents \u2014 her mother, a real estate agent and her father, a contractor \u2014 took the hit especially hard. They had to declare bankruptcy and they also got a divorce. Her dad, in response, bought a boat.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhich is something that a man does both at rock bottom and at the tippy-top of his life,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cWhen one buys a boat, [it\u2019s] in crisis or celebration. In this case, it was because he couldn\u2019t afford to live on the land anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, for a while, Setnik had to live on a boat. She said she has some \u201cbad associations\u201d with boats because of it, but she said she\u2019s excited to be with a bunch of stand-ups all in one place.
\u201cI\u2019m excited about it because you don\u2019t really get to see the comedians that you work with all at once,\u201d Setnik said. \u201cWe\u2019re all pretty scattered around the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ruby Setnik started doing stand-up while still in high school at The Met in Sacramento. Now, eight years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":461040,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[701,702,181787,121,123,122],"class_list":["post-461039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sacramento","tag-capital-public-radio","tag-cpr","tag-ruby-setnik-financially-responsible-comedian","tag-sacramento","tag-sacramento-headlines","tag-sacramento-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461039"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461039\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/461040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}