Anthony Robustiano: From Social Media Stardom to the Stand-Up Comedy Stage

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People always talk about funny bones, but comedy is a muscle. Of course, some people are born with a natural ability to make people laugh. But to go from good to great — from the goofy one in your friend group to a professional stand-up comic — requires dedication. To make it as a comedian, you’ve got to grind, workshopping your material the same way a bodybuilder might work out their biceps in the gym.

It’s fitting, then, that Anthony Robustiano started his comedy journey while working as a regional manager for Planet Fitness in Cincinnati. That’s where the 34-year-old comic — who has since amassed nearly 2 million followers across various social media platforms —  first started filming himself during the pandemic, riffing on relatable topics ranging from dating struggles to childhood snow days. Before that job, he had spent years working as an accountant, where he says he was “just miserable.” Making people laugh was what made him happy, and it turned out he was good at it.

“I would just put those videos out, and quickly, I went to, like, 50,000 followers, to 100,000, to 500,000, to a million,” Robustiano says. That gave him the confidence to quit his job at the gym and try his hand at being a stand-up comedian full-time.

It did not go as planned.

“I would just go up to all the major cities and wait in line for the open mic, and it was ‘no’s across the board,” he says. “So I’m like, ‘This isn’t going the way I wanted it to go, and I lost every dime I had,’ and so I called my dad, and it was probably the toughest call to make, like I’m failing. Here I was, I have a master’s degree in accounting, I had this great-paying job at the time, I’m 28 and I said, ‘I’m gonna just quit ’cause I can do this,’ and now I’m calling my parents like, ‘I need help’ and my dad said, ‘We’ve been waiting for this call. Come to Vermont.'”

Robustiano took a little convincing. “I was like, ‘You can’t catch me dead in Vermont,'” he says with a laugh. At his father’s suggestion, he took a week to think it over, still working as a DoorDash delivery driver and mulling his options. “To be a comedian, you have to be delusional to think you can actually really do it, right?” he says. “I’d be in this car, and I’d picture myself on the couch with Jimmy Fallon, what I was gonna tell him, how I was gonna say it. I would come up with jokes and stories and bits in my head on these drives while also delivering people their cheeseburger and fries.”

After an encounter with a sushi restaurant employee who rudely dismissed him as “just the driver,” he was ready to throw in the towel. “I called my dad, and I was like, ‘I’ll be in Vermont in a couple days,'” he says. “When I got there, I was like, ‘I quit comedy. It’s just not in the cards.'” He took a job at his family’s establishment, Robo Creemees & General Store, to get back on his feet, but his parents encouraged him to continue working on his material. He’d film videos for the store’s social media of himself making sandwiches and being funny. Soon enough, he became a bit of a local celebrity.

“I saw people coming in like, ‘You’re the guy from the video, right?'” he says. Eventually, he realized he could market himself the same way he was selling sandwiches, writing “every bit that I would have did on stage” and releasing it on social media instead.

“It’s a different time. This is your stage now,” Robustiano says, gesturing towards his phone. “The Chris Rocks and the Jerry Seinfelds and the Kevin Harts, how they made it, it’s a different day. I’ve always said, the most expensive form of currency today is attention. So why do I need a stage when the stage is right in front of me? So I would set my phone up in my car, and I would wake up at 6 in the morning because we would work [in the store] at 7, just do a bit and I post it. And then I was like, ‘Let’s do this every day.'” 

“One of my favorite comedians is Andrew Schulz, and he said that when he blew up, he put out a 60-second bit every week,” he continues. “I was like, well, I’ll just do it every single day and people will know me as the funny guy that’s either ranting in his car or coming up with sketches. And then I noticed people coming into the store just to take a picture with me and I’m like, ‘Oh wow, this is crazy.'”

After a while, of course, there was a stage — a lot of them, in fact. Robustiano signed with an agent and went on tour. But getting back onstage didn’t come without its hurdles. After bombing at a show in Boston, he got a pep talk from his mom that reminded him to always keep pushing.

“She was like, ‘If you don’t pick your ass up, get back into that fucking venue and hold your head up high, I would very highly recommend that you quit comedy right now and you don’t pick up another mic, you don’t write another joke, you don’t do another video again. Because if you can’t handle that, just quit,'” he remembers. “She’s like, ‘This is why I told you in the beginning you need to have thick skin. Things go well, okay; things go bad, you got to be the same way and you got to keep moving forward. But if you let this affect you, then just quit.'”

It’s advice he took to heart. He accepts that not every joke he writes or video he posts will be a winner, and yet he’s still committed to putting out a truly impressive amount of material. “I want to continue to evolve, and the only way to do that is to just do some new stuff,” he says. “I’m not afraid to do that. One comedian said to me, ‘I give you credit, you put out basically a new bit every day on social.’ Yeah, because it’s our job to write jokes. I’m not saving anybody, right? I’m just writing, and my brain doesn’t stop, whether I think it’s fully ready or not. I don’t care, I’m gonna put it out. I have no worry at all. Oh, it didn’t work? I’ll write a new one. Oh, the video bombed? Okay, it’s not a good video. We’ll just make another one, and I’ll have another idea.”

Getting those reps in isn’t always easy, whether you’re lifting weights or doing comedy. But Robustiano has already experienced all the ups and downs of the industry. And whenever he finds himself struggling to stay motivated, he just thinks about how fortunate he is to be able to make people laugh for a living.

“I’m very grateful to be doing what I’m doing, and when I feel like I don’t want to do a video, it’s like, ‘That’s what you’re upset about, you don’t want to be silly today?'” he says. “Like I would be killing myself trying to finish financial statements or worrying about having to fire someone at the gym because they weren’t doing their job where I could potentially be ruining their lives, but now you don’t want to film a video that you love to do? So yeah, I’m taking that perspective of understanding how lucky I am to be doing what I’m doing and have this as a career.”

You can catch Anthony Robustiano on tour in a city near you. Click here to see a list of dates. All looks are courtesy of Original Penguin; you can shop their fall collection here.

All photos by Johanna Stickland.