It’s Always Been Amber Ruffin’s Show

Amber Ruffin is ready to have some fun. Almost one month after The Amber Ruffin Show premiered on NBC’s Peacock, the nerves have worn away, leaving her with the accolades of a successful launch and the challenge of an entire season ahead of her. She’s returned to Studio 8G, where she helms as a writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers. But this time, she’s the one in the driver’s seat, a power which brings on some feelings of trepidation, but a whole lot of readiness— all of which she’s ready to laugh about.

“It’s fun,” Amber told me during a zoom call filled with laughter. “It’s exciting. The first show was less fun because no one had told you you were doing a good job yet. Which is stressful. But then, we did it. And my mommy really liked it. So now it’s full steam ahead.”

A woman who turned a failed Saturday Night Live audition, the experience of improv, and a successful stint as a late-night writer into her own self-titled show, full steam seems less like a descriptor of Ruffin’s future and more like an apt characterization of her entire career in showbiz. First starting as an improv performer in Omaha, Ruffin spent an influential part of her time at Second City, where her relationship with fellow comic Jenny Hagel proved extremely important to the future of her profession. After “absolutely bombing” an SNL audition at 30 Rock, the universe shone down in a phone call from one Seth Meyers, offering Ruffin a spot on his inaugural writing staff. Six years later, Ruffin isn’t just a major force behind the scene, but an integral part of the show. Many of Meyer’s most successful bits only succeed through Ruffin’s comedic timing and genius, which plays out strongest in sketches like Amber Says What and Jokes Seth Can’t Tell. 

For Ruffin, her role in the writer’s room of Seth Meyers required an intense process of creation, revision, and perfection, something that didn’t guarantee her sketch would be chosen. Now as the head boss, her time as a writer has perfectly prepared her to make the funniest choices. But that doesn’t mean they’re always the easiest. 

 In a post-pandemic era, the world of late-night has had to make major concessions to keep afloat. For The Amber Ruffin Show that meant premiering without an audience, something considered an essential part of the late-night recipe. Ruffin’s humor relies on a combination of high pitched inflection, and the wry tonal quality of someone is also laughing at themselves. As a head writer or segment host, she acts the perfect foil to Meyer’s straight white male energy. But as the star of her own show, she must thread the line between what she thinks is hilarious, and what the audience is willing to laugh with her about. 

“Buddy, what did we get ourselves into?” Amber joked while describing her favorite bit, which appeared on the October 9th episode of the show. “This is what happens when you don’t have an audience. You just lean more and more towards exactly what you feel like doing.” 

And for better or worse, exactly what Amber Ruffin feels like doing seems to be working pretty well. Between talking about margaritas as the writer’s only activity, support from our mothers and how much I loved Amber’s bright pink jumpsuit, we talked about the pressures of having her own show, the awkward and annoying constraints of the phrase “making history,” and why she’s been ready for this opportunity her entire life. After all, it’s Amber Ruffin’s show. 

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and length. 

Zoe Christen Jones: Did you feel any pressure about succeeding with the show? I feel like a lot of times people use the words like “making history”, or, you know, like, this is the “first black woman,” “Late Night!” Does it..does it feel intense? 

Amber Ruffin: No. It- I mean, there’s a lot of people saying that I’m the first this and that, but I’m not the first anything. I’m not the first late-night show for a black lady. There’s been, like, four. So, I don’t feel that crazy pressure. But also what the world is now is a little different so I feel overqualified to talk about what is happening. 

ZCJ: I love that. 

AR: I just rely on that feeling. 

ZCJ: Do you feel overqualified because you think it’s pretty easy to talk about the things that you go through…or do you think that you’re just lucky to have the platform that you do? 

AR: I feel overqualified in that I can talk about things…I can talk about racism as more than an idea. You know? 

ZCJ: Yeah.

AR: I can talk about it as a very real concept that’s like, you know, stopping me from going to the doctor just everywhere. You know what I mean? Like just the regular sh*t that other people can’t really speak to. You know? It’s like hearing a rumor and talking about it. Well, it happened to me. I saw it. So you know what I mean? I feel like that we’re at a point now where there’s a lot of people just talking about things that have been happening in theory and in theory why that’s bad but you can look at me and I’ll be like ‘This is happening to me and I don’t like this.’ You know? and it’s two separate, completely different things. 

ZCJ: Do you think that experience helps with the way that you frame the stuff? It’s easier for you to make jokes about it because it is so important to you because it has happened to you? 

AR: Yeah, I do think that being a black person colors (haha) how you talk about what is happening as far as racism in the world because you are- you have talked about it since forever. So like it’s not my third conclusion I’ve come to about race. I’m not going through any reckoning of any kind. So I’m just talking about how it’s always been. 

ZCJ: Is there anything about this time [the pandemic] that makes it easier for you to do the show? 

AR: Because we’re premiering during a pandemic, we have to do shows without our audience, I can say whatever I want and be like, ‘that was funny.’ Even though no one laughed. But that’s not a luxury I’m going to have when the audiences come back, ya know? Fingers crossed that that will ever happen. But when you do, your focus shifts from, ‘are people going to like this?’ to, ‘Do I like it? Well, that’s enough, because I’m all there is.’ So, things are definitely getting weird. 

ZCJ: Do you think that focus and lack of audience helps you guys write better things or at least things that crack you up? 

AR: I hope so. I don’t know. Cuz once you- wanting to please an audience is the whole reason why you become a performer so it’s hard to shake. But, a nice replacement is making your little friends laugh. That’s something. It’s not nothin’!” 

ZCJ: What’s your favorite thing about making people laugh, then? 

AR: I don’t know. I mean I imagine the technical answer to that question is, I am missing *starts laughing* I have a hole that can only be filled by the laughter of others. I mean, likely that’s the problem. Likely, it’s a problem. I don’t know. I do think it’s fun. And I do have that, like, thing where you desperately want people to be having fun. Like I only have one party a year, because the thought of someone coming to my house and having a bad time f*cking lays me out. I can’t stand the thought of it. So I do think that that is what motivates me to do shows the way I do shows. 

(the interview pauses so I can admire Ruffin’s colorful water bottle)

ZCJ: Why was it so important for you to have the people that you picked for your writing staff? 

AR: My writing staff are all like- I never knew, and this is bad, I never knew that people wrote comedy who didn’t perform comedy. I didn’t know you could do that until I got here at Late Night and people were like, “Well I had been a writer at this and this.” And I was like, ‘Oh do you…so you do, stand-up, or what?’ and they’re like ‘What? No, I’m a writer.’ I was like ‘Oh my god. I didn’t know people did that!’ I don’t even- I don’t see how it works. I don’t know how you could live like that. To get the laughs and then not get the laughs is murder. But yeah, I think that all of my writers are perfect because they were all performers who are also writers. So they all have that thing where they think of the way it looks and feels and the tone of it and, you know, what you’re wearing and what your accent is because they know how you are gonna get that laugh off of the performance of it. Whereas, I don’t know that other writers can do that. Ya know? But it’s very important to me because I am a performer performer. Like I’ll sing a song, I’ll f*ckin’ flip around, it- ya know? I’ll do it all. And I like that my whole writing staff- like if we could, if we had to, we could do like a full ass musical. We could write it, we could perform it, we could dance it, it’s nuts! So like, these people are all like, the craziest, talented folks that there are. 

ZCJ: I love that. Do you think that there was anything that happened at Seth Meyers that you feel, like, prepared you for this? Or did you feel like you knew you could do this show 8 years ago? 

AR: I don’t know. I think that I always knew that I could do this show, but it is also like me to be like, “yeah I can do that.” “Well, of course I can do that” will so be my last words. ‘Of course I can do that! It’s fine! I got it. It’s fine, how hard can it be?’ Oh, actually my last words will be, ‘how hard can it be?’ [For Seth Meyers] you write sketches and then one gets chosen and then you perfect it. But now, you write a bunch of sketches and then you decide whether it gets picked or not. I mean, you pick it by writing it. It’s nuts. I’m still not used to it. But yeah, the amount that we write is what prepared me. Like, we write a lot of sketches and now we are writing sketches at a faster rate. But I do think I was prepared. 

ZCJ: I think it’s fair to say that Black Lives Matter dominated how we think and talk and how we’re gonna remember the rest of this year. Did it feel kind of frustrating to be like, “Do we have to talk about this again?”

AR: No, never. I mean, I’ll never get enough Black Lives Matter because it’s just the craziest phenomenon that people are like, ‘Nuh-uh.’ That’s insane! And I can’t stop looking at it. I mean, that’s a nutty thing that happened. That we said ‘stop killing us.’ And people said, ‘shut up.’ Like, that’s crazy to me. So, I don’t feel that way, but I do get the question like, sometimes I- I think, what if Martin Luther King just wanted to be a ballerina? Like he had no f*cking choice. He had no choice but to go and lead and blah and blah. But who knows what he wanted to do? You know? I am lucky that I get to sometimes make a point about race, but then also dress like a dinosaur. Which, I was gonna dress like a dinosaur no matter what, so, it’s a small price to pay. 

ZCJ: Does it ever feel hard, to try and make something that’s so serious funny? Or at least to kind of make jokes about it? 

AR: Mmmm, making jokes about serious stuff is kind of how I communicate. So it’s never too far away from where I’m at, but sometimes we will be like ‘You know what, we just absolutely cannot talk about x, y, or, z at all.’ But only because I am- I do like to joke about everything. You know, we joke about everything so sometimes I do have to check my own self. 

ZCJ: Do you have any goals for the show that you really want to accomplish?

AR: Oh, I don’t know. I want the show to be good and to do a good job. And I want the people working on the show to have a little bit of fun. I know no one can have the amount of fun I’m having, which is crazy because I mean, ultimately the writing the show- being a part of the show is insane because I’m having the most fun. And at the end of the day, it’s a bunch of people working very hard so that you can have the dumbest fun possible. So it’s this weird feeling of guilt a little bit and like it feels nuts. Can you do 100% exactly what you feel like doing? Well, let’s see— I know my mom will like it. 

The Amber Ruffin Show is available now on Peacock