San Bruno native and comedian hits the Tonight Show

It wasn’t her first late-night appearance — she was on the The Late Show with Stephen Colbert show years earlier — but any performance on a stage of that magnitude is something akin to a badge of honor. It also carries weight coming from a family where David Letterman and Johnny Carson were household staples, Peluffo said.

“The Tonight Show is such a big family achievement, I would say. It was nerve wracking. It’s always terrifying, because you get one shot,” she said. “I remember being on the stage being like, ‘Oh, my hands are shaking. I hope no one can notice.’”

Her nerves likely won’t be what a viewer first notices watching Peluffo’s stand-up — which touches on themes of “sex, drugs, rock and roll,” she quipped — and has been honed over an 11-year comedy career.

“I talk about sex. I talk about my history with alcohol and dating. You know, I was a party girl and I finally got my shit together, thank God,” she said. “Comedy helps with that a lot.”

Peluffo is a born-and-raised Bay Area native and an alumna of Capuchino High School, where she excelled as a midfielder on the girls’ soccer team. She then went on to the University of California, San Diego, to play soccer — experiences that informed her comedic forays.

“Being an athlete, that helps me a lot. I came at comedy as repetition. It’s almost an endurance sport, like, how long can you last in poverty?” she joked. “You have to do these open mics, and you do five or six a night, and you’re running around and saying the same jokes, figuring out how to say things. Trial and error.”

Comedy was not Peluffo’s first career, she said, recalling googling ‘how to start stand-up comedy.’

“I had two failed careers before this,” she said. “I wanted to be a professional soccer player … and then I started doing art. I went to art school, I spent a lot of money to be an artist, I had a studio in Bushwick, and that didn’t work out. At the time, it was devastating, but without those two failures, I definitely wouldn’t be here.”

Even as her comedy career began to take off, the pandemic stifled things, sending Peluffo back to her day job.

“I remember vividly being on all fours, because I was an art handler, on all fours in a museum, scraping paint off the floor,” she said. “And I looked up at my boss, and I said, ‘I was on TV!’”

Peluffo is grateful for the varying experiences that have shaped her life — and informed her material — she said, but she’s equally appreciative of the chance she took on comedy and the first open mic night she worked up the courage to attend.

“You can’t be afraid to reinvent yourself,” she said. “If you’re meant to do it, you have to try it to find out if you’re meant to do it.”

Despite the downsides — everyone knows she didn’t get the cats in her most recent breakup, for example, and men have serious trouble dating women funnier than them, Peluffo joked — it’s a job she loves.

“I get to tell jokes for a living. I get to be a silly goose. I get to just talk. Of course, it’s not as simple as just talking. There’s a lot of background work that goes into it to make 15 minutes fun,” she said. “But then again, I go on stage, and I get paid to talk for 15 minutes.”

And aside from the clarifications Peluffo has to make that Capuchino High School’s mascot is not a latte, but a mustang, when she talks about her hometown, she loves being from San Bruno, too.

“Growing up in the Bay Area was pretty rad,” she said. “I always love coming home.”

Peluffo’s comedy album, Dirty Bird, is available now, and tickets for her upcoming shows can be found here: punchup.live/caitlinpeluffo.