Amber Ruffin earns TV spotlight
If you’re someday in need of a plus-one to liven an unpromising party, consider Amber Ruffin. In fact, skip the party and just hang with Ruffin, whose weekly comedy show is proving her to be excellent company.
Ruffin’s exuberant charm can and should lure you in to Peacock’s weekly “The Amber Ruffin Show,” but expect humor that’s incisive and impressively deft, including on race, politics and the sunny side of life, such as it is.
Trained in improv and a writer on NBC’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers” since 2014, Ruffin was ready for her star turn on Peacock: The streaming service ordered 10 additional episodes of the weekly show that debuted last fall, with new halfhours released on Fridays.
Ruffin easily shifts from “wildly silly to incredibly insightful and moving,” Meyers said. “There are very few people that can swing back and forth as ably as Amber can, and that’s been on full display on our show and even more so on hers.”
Tarik Davis, her comedy partner as well as an actor and singer, is Ruffin’s game sidekick through jokes, skits and duets.
This interview with Ruffin has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: What pulled you out of your hometown (Omaha, Nebraska) and to Chicago to pursue a career in comedy?
A: I used to improvise in Omaha …and we would go to Chicago to do the Chicago Improv Festival. … You get to see real improvisers you only ever heard stories about. So one year I’m there, and Charna Halpern, who runs the iO Theater in Chicago, said, ‘If you move here, you’ll have a full-time job within a year.’ And she was right, I did.
Q: Did you know what your ultimate goal was?
A: Everything that happens to me is a surprise. I did not see myself ever going to New York. And when I got this job writing for Seth, I knew people wrote for late-night shows, but you just don’t hear a lot about that and certainly don’t hear about Black people doing it, so it just didn’t occur to me that it was a thing. Then when I got this job, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m just never going to know what is the next thing.’ I don’t try to guess, and I don’t try to plan anything. But I have to be trying to do a very good job because it seems like that what’s driving everything is my working hard and hopefully doing a good job.
Q: A number of Black women are coming into their own as successful writers, producers and performers. … Why do you think that’s the case?
A: Most of the Black women I know take care of what is wrong, and no matter what their job is, they’re doing four people’s jobs. They’re always making sure that everything’s taken care of, and when no one else will do it, it falls to us. I think once people started hiring Black women to write on shows, they realized we won’t just take care of the things you asked us to hand in.
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