From The Comic's Comic

Emmy-nominated only for Outstanding Writing For A Variety Series

You know how the Late Night with Seth Meyers segment, “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell,” is always great? What if they made the whole show out of that?

Better yet, what if they let the two jokers who’ve told those jokes decide to do whatever they wanted to do for a half-hour every Friday, or 35 out of the past 52 Fridays?

That’s The Amber Ruffin Show!

Ruffin’s weekly comedy showcase, which premiered Sept. 25, 2020, is available only on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming platform. They film new episodes on Fridays in 30 Rockefeller Plaza’s Studio 8G, used Mondays-Thursdays by Late Night, where Ruffin and her showrunner and head writer, Jenny Hagel, write for Meyers when they’re not plotting their own breakaway hit. They and their writing staff are up for an Emmy Award tonight — in Outstanding Writing for a Variety Series — although they also should get all of the awards this year! They’re just operating at another level from America’s other “late-night” comedy talk shows right now.

What sets Ruffin’s show apart from the rest?

For one thing, Ruffin, her sidekick Tarik Davis and her crew have so much more fun that it’s contagious (in only the best ways, I hear you pandemic!). In their final episode of season one (from this weekend), they quickly broke into song, as Ruffin is wont to do. Only now, because they’ve welcomed a vaccinated studio audience for the past few weeks, Ruffin’s duet with Davis celebrating their renewal for season two could quickly morph into a call-and-response with said audience, singing “Amber Ruffin” back at Ruffin and Davis.

Even when Ruffin dives into a weighty topic, she infuses it with whimsy. This past weekend, she took the new Texas abortion law, combined with deteriorating conditions for women in Afghanistan, and spun lyrics on it to the tune of “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppets, aiming her humor straight at the men of the world by changing the titular lyric to “Ban Ejaculation.”

Later in this season’s finale, Ruffin wanted to welcome back Broadway productions with her own song-and-dance tribute, which Hagel in a voiceover used to mock Ruffin in turn.

What makes the show work so well, so confidently?

Great chemistry!

Ruffin and Davis both performed at Boom Chicago, an improv institution in Amsterdam full of Americans, and plenty of them coming from American comedy institutions such as The Second City. Second City’s Denver outpost briefly flickered into existence just long enough for Ruffin and Hagel to become fast friends there back in 2006.

Part of the reason Ruffin’s show has so much energy came, weirdly enough, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown forcing them to launch without a studio audience. As Ruffin reflected last fall in a conversation with Hagel for the 2020 virtual Just For Laughs festival:

“When you don’t have an audience, you have to generate all of the energy an audience would have generated. So it is crazy exhausting to do the show, and then generate all of the energy the show needs to have any kind of momentum. That is the hard part.”

Hagel said their short-form improv experience taught them not only how to get rough first drafts of scripts out into the world, but also how to play improv games with news headlines. They’ve worked wonders together already.

Ruffin pumps out ideas. Hagel smooths them out.

Hagel said if she had a comedy superpower, it’d be trimming the fat in a sketch or a monologue joke.

“I think I can look at a sketch and be like, you don’t need this beat. I can look at a monologue joke and be like, you can lose these two words. I know that’s not like a sexy skill, but I feel like I think of pieces of comedy almost like, you know when you see a cheetah run in a nature documentary and it’s so lean, it’s just muscle. There’s not an ounce of fat on it. And that’s what helps it run so fast. And so smoothly. And I think of comedy like that. Every extra bit, every extra word, or beat just weighs it down and doesn’t allow it to run.”

Hagel described Ruffin’s superpower: “I’ve never met somebody who can read an audience the way that you read it and give them exactly what they want and what they’re capable of handling.”

When Meyers took over Late Night in 2014, media crowed over how much more diverse his inaugural writing staff looked from the rest of the landscape, dominated by white men both in front of and behind the camera. When we talk about allowing more diverse voices to be heard and seen onscreen, one of the great and most effective ways for Hollywood to actually achieve is this by hiring diverse voices to participate in all parts of the process.

Hiring Ruffin and Hagel allowed Ruffin first a chance to demonstrate her talent. Remember “Amber Says What?”

Then Hagel joined Ruffin on either side of Meyers for “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell.”

That, in turn, begat The Amber Ruffin Show.

Which allowed Ruffin and Hagel to bring even more voices into the conversation. Barely a month into her first season, Ruffin took the clip of a Republican Congressman purposely botching the pronunciation of Kamala Harris’s name to illustrate that by name-checking her own writing staff.

Ruffin’s Emmy-nominated writing staff now consists of head writer Hagel, writing supervisor Demi Adejuyigbe, Ashley Nicole Black, Michael Harriot, Shantira Jackson, Ian Morgan and Dewayne Perkins.

They’ve also gotten Meyers’s other new hires, including Jeff Wright, into the act.

Above: Ruffin with the NYC-based portion of her writers and performers.

Back in February, I suggested NBC trimming Saturday Night Live down from 90 minutes to an hour, and giving the final half-hour to The Amber Ruffin Show.

Instead, NBC granted Ruffin’s show a brief trial run over two weeks at 1:30 a.m. Eastern/Pacific in the overnight Friday/Saturday slot.

They should immediately start season two of her show in the Meyers slot on Fridays, at least, since he’s not using it for new episodes. C’mon, you cowards at NBCUniversal!

In the meantime, Ruffin looks at her show this way: “I want people to feel like they aren’t going crazy” she said last year, about wanting to stay in the truth about what’s happening right now in the nation and the world. And she’s grateful for the opportunity she has to do so.

“Having not been really listened to, and then like now all of a sudden, people are like what do you have to say, Amber?” she said. “I’m just trying to get it all out before no-one wants to hear me out anymore.”

She shouldn’t have to worry about that anytime soon, at least. Thank goodness.