Committing to the Bit
Amber Ruffin already knows exactly how she wants to play it.
THE AMBER RUFFIN SHOW PEACOCK.
in february, Amber Ruffin kicked off an episode of The Amber Ruffin Show with a short intro. “If you’re watching us for the first time on NBC, welcome!” the host said with her typical yourfavorite-theater-camp-counselor enthusiasm. “This is a late-night show! We don’t have guests, but we have sketches, songs, jokes, and margaritas. You’re gonna like it—or else.” She did not snicker or wink as she delivered that threat, her voice dropping into a campy baritone. Like your favorite theater-camp counselor, Ruffin always commits to the bit.
To many NBC viewers, Ruffin is already familiar from her regular appearances on Late Night With
Seth Meyers, where she has been a writer and an onscreen personality for several years. Last fall, her own weekly show debuted on NBC’s streaming
platform, Peacock, and in February, NBC decided to air two episodes of the series in the network’s 1:30 a.m. time slot. Taking over a slot usually reserved for reruns— and for only two weeks—isn’t a huge show of confidence. But a broadcast network picking up a streaming series isn’t nothing, either, and it bodes well for The Amber Ruffin Show that NBCUniversal announced in March that its first-season run on Peacock would be extended at least through September.
As her NBC intro would suggest, Ruffin does not reinvent the wheel. Hers is a show built on familiarity. For the monologue, she mostly sits behind a desk delivering topical punch lines. Many of the segments use tried-and-true late-night formats, selected and adapted for Ruffin’s particular strengths. She does short, serious John Oliver–esque deep dives into the history of a current news item. Like Jimmy Fallon, she performs silly, satirical songs (albeit with much sharper lyrics). The opening monologue of that February episode was set up in a manner similar to SNL’s “Weekend Update” with jokes that were short and fairly light: a couple of Biden-Harris zingers, one on Kmart’s closing, and another about the Cherokee line of Jeeps. Even in the first episodes on Peacock, Ruffin’s host persona was already in place in all its iterations—her sweet, slightly sly baseline; the heightened camp of her goofiest sketches; the pivot toward directness and exasperation in her political segments. She delights in toggling between the broad and the specific.
Ruffin is the only Black woman hosting a late-night comedy show in 2021 and is on a still painfully short list of people of color to be given host positions. One of Ruffin’s breakouts on Late Night was a running segment called “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell,” in which she and her fellow writerperformer Jenny Hagel would come out and do jokes that the straight white male Meyers would never say. Much of The Amber Ruffin Show—where Hagel is now head writer—is a demonstration of how great it is to have a voice like Ruffin’s on TV and a testament to how freeing it is for her to have her own platform.
She brings perspectives on political humor that could appear on other latenight shows but rarely do. Ruffin and her fellow Late Night writer and performer Jeff Wright did a musical parody called “Now That’s What I Call Spirituals 2021.” She had a segment on the need for White History Month and another on the history of racism in scientific research and its relationship to Black vaccine reticence. But she also gets to play a time traveler and a stereotypical mom and be the most excited anyone on TV has ever been about a musical number (with the possible exception of James Corden).
In her first episode on NBC, Ruffin announced a monologue joke that would be read aloud by Wright, who was filling in for Tarik Davis as the show’s sidekick that night. It was a real groaner about Biden’s oil-drilling policy that ended with “All’s well that ends wells” and segued into a harebrained sketch: Wright was very excited about this opportunity to read his first monologue joke, but then an audience member named Randy, the only person sitting in the otherwise covidsafe empty theater, stepped on Wright’s punch line.
Wright was furious; Ruffin apologized. Then The Amber Ruffin Show clicked out of nice, unsurprising late-night territory and into murder-mystery farce. The lights blinked out, and when they came up again, Randy had been stabbed with a giant, very-fake-looking sword. Wright pretended to have no idea what had happened, and Ruffin shifted into haplessdetective mode, futilely accusing everyone other than the obvious suspect. It was supremely dumb, this sketch. It took one oddball swerve after another in a series of escalating, preposterous pile-ons with zero underlying message, purpose, or peg except for being silly to the max.
Hosts like Stephen Colbert and Conan O’Brien tend to play big, broad gags with an undercurrent of knowingness, with line readings and glances at the camera that say, Isn’t this funny?! But Ruffin was in it, from her aghast expression to the distinct change in her intonation and diction that signaled the new mode—a character that felt just as authentically Ruffin as when she does Monologue Host
or Comedic Song Host or Chitchatting With Her Sidekick Host. All of it felt like an extended illustration of one short line Ruffin delivered earlier in the episode when she talked about movie theaters in New York reopening at 25 percent capacity: “Also known as a great crowd for an improv show.” Then she turned to a side camera and sang a ten-second ditty: “Some of these jokes are for you, that much is true. But some of these jokes are just for me!” That’s what makes her show so good.