Amber Ruffin on Racism, Comedy and the Joy of Enduring
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
When Amber Ruffing was in third grade, she was obsessed with crafting. She spent hours making mosaics out of bits of paper cut from magazines. One day, she came home with a book from her school library in Omaha, Nebraska, that included instructions for making “something called a golliwog.” Unaware at the time that a golliwog is a racist caricature that originated in a 19th-century children’s book, she showed the book to her mother.
“She was immediately infuriated,” Ruffin writes in “You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism,” the 2021 book she co-authored with her sister Lacey Lamar.
More from WWD
As Ruffin recounts, her mother called the school’s librarian and calmly excoriated her for exposing Amber to racist imagery. “My stories about Mom verbally executing people are like these artful, well-thought-out, beautiful speeches she made that have just the right amount of meanness and spunk. I learned so much from watching her shake people out of their ignorance with her words.”
Ruffin, 43, is also shaking people out of their ignorance with her words — and jokes, skits and song and dance numbers performed in a sequined blazer. She first did it on “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” where she has been a cast member and writer since 2014. Now she’s doing it on a weekly basis with her eponymous Peacock show.
In its third season, “The Amber Ruffin Show” is a comedic civics lesson on the damage caused by systemic racism and what can be done about it. In her signature segment, “How Did We Get Here?”, Ruffin unpacks the daily outrages of the news cycle with acerbic, sometimes profane punchlines, but always delivered with her infectious positivity.
She used the racist backlash over the casting of Black actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in Disney’s upcoming live action adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” to explain Hollywood’s “empathy gap” wherein “viewers who want to see themselves on TV…believe that a lady can have a fin for a butt but not melanin.”
In a segment about a Tennessee school resource officer, or SRO, who pepper-sprayed a high school student because the student did not want to play kickball in physical education, she documents the racial imbalance in arrests by SROs. Other segments have explored the racial disparity of credit scores and their impact on who gets home mortgages and the systemic bias of the Internal Revenue Service, which disproportionately audits taxpayers who claim the earned income tax credit.
It’s a verbal sleight of hand that makes Ruffin one of the most intriguing comedians working today.
“I think most marginalized people are absolutely hilarious. You have to be so you can actually live,” she says during a Zoom interview from her office at Rockefeller Center. “Either you’ve gone completely mad, or you’re hilarious.”
After the murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020, when the pandemic forced late-night television to be produced remotely, Ruffin delivered a series of emotional recollections of her own traumatic run-ins with the police on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” Many of these encounters included police officers pointing their guns at Ruffin. And they are all too common in the Black community. Talking to the audience from her empty apartment, her face devoid of makeup and without the in-studio accoutrements of late-night television, these monologues have a raw power.
With her Peacock show, which bowed in the fall of 2020 after a summer of widespread protests, Ruffin has leaned into and expanded her own brand of racial justice comedy. If her “Late Night,” COVID-19-era soliloquies had an innate gravity that met the moment, “The Amber Ruffin Show” is a comedic call to to action.
“I think Amber recognizes that the fight for racial justice is a fight to live our lives in joy. Those two things, which seem incompatible, actually go hand in hand,” says Matthew López, her cowriter on the Broadway version of “Some Like It Hot.” “The fight for justice is the fight for the right to experience a life of joy. And she is a very joyful person.”
Of course, putting a show together in the middle of a pandemic that sent the world into lockdown had its challenges; a writers’ room on Zoom does not crackle with the same energy. But it was also an opportunity, says showrunner Jenny Hagel (who is also Ruffin’s partner on “Late Night’s” Jokes Seth Can’t Tell bit).
At “Late Night,” explains Hagel, Meyers would test his monologue jokes and sketches in front of a rehearsal audience. If the audience reacted favorably to a joke, it would stay. If a joke didn’t land, it would often be cut from the final version of the show. “We assumed that we would build Amber’s show in a similar way,” says Hagel. “And then the pandemic hit and we didn’t have an audience at all. The unexpected upside of that is that you end up not chasing other people’s tastes. I think it allowed us to carve out a very unique voice for the show because we were thinking, OK, this is what we think is funny, or this is the point we want to make about this news story. We might have a couple of real funny laugh-out-loud jokes, and one or two that are softer jokes. But they make the point we want to make.”
By the second season, when there was a (vaccinated) studio audience, the show and Ruffin had really honed its voice, adds Hagel. “By the time we brought an audience in, it felt like we had a really strong voice. It felt like, ‘Hey, we’re throwing this party. We figured out what the party is. Want to come have a good time and do it with us?’”
It’s clear that Ruffin knows how to have a good time.
“The show is a million percent cathartic,” she says. “I guess I’d always realized that from working on ‘Late Night,’ but it’s a different level when it’s exactly your show. It’s filtered through no one. You are the filter and you get to shout out loud all the things you want to shout. You really get to the bottom of literally everything. And it feels outstanding. It really does.”
Ruffin’s entrée into comedy came through improv with Boom Chicago in Amsterdam (the improv troop also counts Jordan Peele, Jason Sudeikis and Meyers as alumni), and then Second City in both Chicago and Denver, where Ruffin and Hagel became friends. (She met her husband, Dutch artist Jan Schiltmeijer when she was living in Amsterdam.)
In 2011, she moved to Los Angeles, where she performed with the YouTube comedy group RobotDown and comedy and musical troupe Story Pirates. In 2014, Ruffin auditioned for “Saturday Night Live,” which at the time was being excoriated for its lack of diversity. She did not get the job, but Hagel — who by then was writing for Meyers, who had just segued from “SNL” to host “Late Night” — called to tell her Meyers was looking for writers. Incredibly, Ruffin became the first Black woman to write for a network late-night show when she joined “Late Night With Seth Meyers” in 2014. She has also written for HBO’s “A Black Lady Sketch Show.” And she makes her Broadway writing debut with “Some Like It Hot,” cowriting the book with López, a Tony Award winner for “The Inheritance.”
Their adaptation of the Billy Wilder classic opens Dec. 11 at The Shubert Theatre with a diverse cast led by Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee in the roles originated by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, and Adrianne Hicks in the Marilyn Monroe role as ukulele player and singer Sugar.
Ruffin is a natural comedic writer with an ear for extemporaneous comedy, notes López.
“She’s incredibly fast,” he says. “It’s also the thing that makes her not too precious about her own ideas. She comes from the improv world where there’s no such thing as precious because ideas don’t last long enough to become precious. She has a very high threshold for failure. And that’s what you want in a collaborator. She’s just so unafraid.”
López had not worked with Ruffin before “Some Like It Hot”; they share an agent at CAA. And when they began collaborating, they were working via email and Zoom. They did not meet in person until several months into the writing process.
López recalls an early reading of the script at a workshop: “Every time we got a laugh, she would write down what kind of laugh it was,” he says. “The writing has to feel spontaneous, but her analysis of the work is very scientific. It’s fascinating that she can use both sides of her brain; the creative side and the analytical side.”
As the youngest of five children, with one brother and three sisters, Ruffin attributes her destiny to the randomness of birth.
“Growing up, it was always, ‘Let the baby do what she wants. Give it to the baby. Oh, the baby wrote a song, listen to the baby.’ I was spoiled within an inch of my life. Not with stuff, but with attention,” she recalls. “I think that’s how I became a performer. Because I got to perform at home and be very weird and that was fine. So it was very easy for me to be goofy in public very early on because I didn’t have any shame to shake off. I also wasn’t trying to be good looking — ever. And it just put me ahead of the game as far as comedy goes.”
She describes her rise in comedy as “pretty standard for Black women my age. We were all tokenized. Coming up in improv spheres, all the Black people were split up so that every team had a Black person.”
It’s better now, she says, but there is clearly room for improvement. “When I was coming up, you certainly had an abundance of ignorance, but you could just say, ‘Don’t talk to me like that, or I’ll beat your ass!’” she laughs. “I don’t know that you could really do that now.”
When ignorance persists, Ruffin is clearly doing her part to stamp it out. She and her sister Lamar, who still lives in Omaha, just released their second book together, “The World Record Book of Racist Stories.”
“I assumed that our [first] book wouldn’t be read by very many people,” says Ruffin. “I know for a fact I have the stomach for it. I can stomach a lot of racism and I mean that in every way.”
She begins to laugh. And then she continues. “I can stomach a lot of racism. But I didn’t think white people would be able to read this book and get to the end of it because so much of it is so horrible. Like people can’t take it, they just can’t.”
Now she is really cracking herself up.
“There were reviews that said: ‘I read this book and it was horrible. But they made it so funny that it was easy to stomach.’ And that wasn’t necessarily the goal. That is just the byproduct of having to live this life. When you take all the normal times out of a human being’s life and you just put the bad times back-to-back, it is shocking. But there was an appetite for that knowledge. And I’m still floored by that. I just am. But you know, it can’t stay horrible forever. Nothing can.”
Best of WWD
