I Don't Trust Adults

Ruby Karp frames her solo show around six specific grown-ups who broke her trust, treating her upbringing in the comedy scene as an extended grudge list. Having spent her childhood running around the Upright Citizens Brigade basement, interviewed by Amy Poehler at seven and hosting her own stand-up show at eleven, she presents herself as a failed child star who saw behind the curtain years before finishing high school.

The set draws its strongest material from Karp’s strange early brushes with public attention. At thirteen, she wrote a viral essay explaining why teenagers were abandoning Facebook, which prompted adult journalists to publish hostile critiques targeting an eighth grader. She folds that public spat into stories about high school theater directors who brought her to tears, using projection slides and archival home videos to document the damage.

Filmed at New York’s SoHo Playhouse following an Off-Broadway run before streaming on Veeps, the performance clocks in at under an hour. By that point, Karp had spent time writing for late-night television digital teams and acting on the improvised series The Charlie Puth Show, bringing an industry veteran’s cynicism to someone barely in her mid-twenties.

Off-Broadway audiences responded warmly to the autobiographical tone, especially those raised on theater camps and early social media, though some theatergoers felt the slide-show confessional approach resembled personal therapy more than a traditional stand-up routine.