Lackawanna County native Samantha Ruddy to bring ‘A Night of NYC Comedy’ to Scranton

A comedian who found success outside of her hometown is coming back to bring “Samantha Ruddy and Friends: A Night of NYC Comedy” to the Scranton Cultural Center.

Samantha Ruddy, originally from Mayfield, has brought an annual comedy show to Scranton for most of the 11 years she’s been performing.

“I love coming back to the area,” Ruddy said. “Scranton has the funniest people, everyone has a great sense of humor. Everyone is down to laugh and like, make fun of themselves, make fun of everything, really.”

The show August 23 will feature Ruddy and two New York-based comedians – Caitlin Peluffo and JP McDade.

“We're all pretty different. JP and I are really like tight joke writers,” Ruddy explained. “Caitlin can write a tight joke, but sometimes she prefers to do a lot of crowd work, and she can really create an electric environment in a way that I've always admired. So I think the three of us are going to bring a really good mix.”

Ruddy also invites a local comedian every year, and Scranton’s Jeannine Luby will perform at this Friday’s show.

From the talent show to "The Tonight Show"

Ruddy first tried comedy as a teen, when she attended an improv class at the Scranton Cultural Center. She performed her first stand-up set at her eighth grade talent show.

“I've been a comedy nerd since I was a little kid,” she said.

She attended Holy Cross High School and joined a sketch comedy group as a student at Syracuse University.

“One night my sketch group went to this open mic. We all tried it, and I just loved it,” she said. “I just never looked back. I started doing stand-up constantly. I almost didn't even want to finish my senior year of college, because I was, like, just so invested in stand-up.”

Ruddy was an IT major, and took a job at a tech company in NYC after graduating.

“I worked there for a few months and then I realized that stand-up was my priority, so I quit,” she said. “I started doing odd jobs, temping, walking dogs, begging my parents for grocery money, and I started doing stand-up like all the time.”

After working at it for about three years, she landed a manager in 2016.

“That really changed everything,” she said. “I was very, very lucky that I got seen when I was young.”

Ruddy was booked to perform on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" in 2018 and "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" in 2022.

She was featured on NPR’s End of Year 2020 Comedy Special and nominated for a Best in Comedy Shorty Award for her social media, where she sometimes jokes about being from Scranton.

She gained experience working on the talk show "Full Frontal with Samantha Bee," and 14,000 followers on Instagram along the way. She now works in advertising, writing commercials for brands including Captain Morgan, Subway and Sony.

Ruddy says exposure to the entertainment industry from her time at Syracuse helped her see that a career in comedy was possible. When asked about the one thing that helped her get where she is, she said “unearned confidence.”

“You just have to be so blindly confident. Because you're constantly going to be told no, and you're constantly going to fail, and you're constantly going to be told you're not good enough,” she said. “You just have to believe that none of that is true, even if maybe it is, you just have to keep going. Because if this industry rewards anything besides, you know, nepotism, it's persistence.”

Ruddy admits she “bombed” in the past, but realized that one bad show was not a representation of her overall talent, and she kept working and putting herself out there.

The comedian has mainly lived in NYC for the last ten years, but recently moved to Philadelphia. Her most recent comedy special, "Baseball Mom," is streaming on Amazon Prime.

She once aimed to be a stand-up comedian full-time, but has learned that she enjoys working multiple jobs.

“I love juggling. I love dipping my toes and everything,” she said. “In an ideal world, I would get to write commercials, I would get to write TV shows… go out and do stand-up whenever I wanted. And honestly, I'm pretty much there."