Amber Ruffin may be one of the booked-and-busiest comedians in the country right now, but underneath it all, she’s just trying to have a little fun.
Over the course of nearly 25 years in comedy, Ruffin has grown from an improv player in Omaha into a supporting player on shows like Key and Peele before becoming a headliner in her own right — thanks in part to her breakout success as a writer and performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers, and the recurring segment “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” with frequent collaborator Jenny Hagel. That led to her own three-season late-night program The Amber Ruffin Show, and a frankly staggering amount of coveted writing credits on everything from Detroiters to The Black Lady Sketch Show to the Tony awards. Ruffin has since been nominated six times for a Primetime Emmy, and received her first Tony nomination in 2023 for adapting Some Like It Hot for Broadway — a show which also scored a trophy for J. Harrison Ghee, one of the first nonbinary performers ever to win a Tony.
As she announced for the first time on Instagram last June, Ruffin is also proudly queer — and since coming out, her calendar has seemingly graduated from “packed” to “overflowing.” While still writing for Late Night, Ruffin is now a weekly panelist on CNN’s Have I Got News for You, an adaptation of the U.K. panel show of the same name which premiered its second season on February 15. She has also been confirmed as the host of the prestigious White House Correspondents’ dinner this year, the first time a Black or LGBTQ+ woman has been the event’s featured performer since Wanda Sykes in 2009.
Hours before she was scheduled to host the 2025 African American Film Critics Association Awards in Los Angeles, Ruffin managed to sneak a few minutes into her schedule for Them. (To nobody’s surprise, Ruffin spent the night laying waste to Donald Trump and Elon Musk: “Do you all remember the good old days when you were proud to say, ‘My president is Black?’ Now, it’s ‘My president is a South African Nazi oligarch.’”)
We asked Ruffin about life after coming out, her bond with HIGNFY co-stars Roy Wood Jr. and Michael Ian Black, and how her new Bigfoot musical accidentally became “horribly topical.”
It seems like it’s been one thing after another for you this past year!
It’s always something. I mean, yes, it’s nice to have a bunch of shit to do. But there’s that fucking document open on my computer, day and night, called “White House Correspondents’ Dinner.” I be chucking jokes in that mug all day, all night. But everything else is kind of fun and silly. Regular work [on Late Night] is just fun, and Have I Got News for You, I don’t have to do anything but show up. Not write a single word. It rules, and it makes you go, “This is how actors live.” They don’t have to write anything, they just show up and they do the thing.
Better yet, like a Housewife. I’m in the wrong line of business. I could be a Real Housewife of New York. I could throw a drink in someone’s face and leave in a huff. They’ll be like, “Here’s a check for billions of dollars.”
I can’t really argue with that. I’m sitting over here with a writer’s paycheck.
I know that’s right.
I’m curious about what the months, going on a year, since you’ve come out have felt like for you. Has it felt like there’s a weight off your chest?
I came out as soon as I realized that I was not straight, and I did it solely because I didn’t want anybody stepping to me with no bullshit. So I feel like I could say there was absolutely no change in anything when I came out. Didn’t nobody care. No one gave a shit. I feel like if you watch The Amber Ruffin Show, you know not to bring no shit around me.
But I could feel the tiniest bit of, “Those poor gay people. What are they going to do?” Like that, you know? And it’s not with any malice. It’s just like, “Ugh, those poor young folks of today.” I didn’t like that distance. And I felt like me living in that distance is kind of a lie. I wasn’t ever going to come out because I didn’t see the need, because I didn’t think it mattered in any way. But it did, and I was wrong. That didn’t last very long.
How does it feel to jump back into Have I Got News for You right now?
It’s busy like a child is busy. Have you ever babysat a brand new walker? Like the baby can walk and it just figured it out? [Trump is] busy like that: We got to go over and you got to pick this thing up. You got to taste it. “Ew, that’s a little fuzzy.” You got to go over here. You got to get this thing. “Hey, I’m hungry!” You got to go over here. It’s that. This is a wandering busy-baby. I can’t stop comparing him to a child, because that’s him.
But getting to do Have I Got News for You is so nice because you talk about it. And no matter what, it’s like therapy. This week, you’re going to look at the ugly thing that happened and you’re going to have to talk about it. And Michael Ian Black and Roy Wood Jr. are so chill you could be like, “You have that wrong and here’s why.” And they’d be like, “Oh, okay.”
It seems like you three have quickly found that dynamic and rapport, where you can bounce off one another and understand where all of your sensibilities are combining.
I feel like what we have in common is — you wouldn’t guess it. I feel like I fall in love with everyone I’ve ever met. And Roy Wood Jr. and Michael Ian Black are both lovebugs, but I think it’s less socially acceptable for boys to say, “Oh, I love everything.” But they do. I do think they love people and I do think they love love, and I think the three of us have that in common. It’s just that I’m honest about it.
That creates a really fun dynamic for the show where Roy is holding things down, you have that intense enthusiasm for a lot of things, and Michael seems so comfortable being the agent provocateur, just slipping in and out of this wry devil’s advocate persona whenever the need arises.
I feel like every week it takes me by surprise.
He mockingly did Elon’s “gesture” in the last episode.
I didn’t see it. It made it into the show?
It’s on YouTube and everything.
[laughs] The whole time we were like, “They’re going to have to cut around him.” I can’t believe it made it into the show. I’ve been out of town so I couldn’t see it. Damn, that’s funny. He wouldn’t stop. However many times he made it into the show, he did it more than that. Yeah, he’s a fool. And I love him. They’re going to come get us.
Similarly, is it as fun to say “titties” on CNN as it looks?
One week I said “cunt” and everyone got mad.
That’s one of my favorite jokes from the first season. “Restaurant apologizes after serving…”
Serving cunt. I thought, “Oh, everyone’s going to say this.” But it went clunk. It was like, “You two motherfuckers clutching your pearls. That’s a lie.”
There are so few U.S. comedy panel shows like HIGNFY. Why do you think that there’s not as big an appetite for that over here?
Well, in the U.K. they got tons of that shit. They have a lot of really good ones, and my favorite is [The Big Fat Quiz of the Year]. I feel like every panel show in Britain is excellent because of how their comedy is. It just is perfect for a panel show. The way we talk and the rhythm of our jokes is not great for a panel show unless you have improvisers, which we are. So it fits, but that’s so rare. A lot of other panel topic shows are written, and the joy of our show is it’s not. Roy is reading, but then Roy is also fucking dicking around. So I wonder if that’s why they haven’t been as successful here, just because it’s just not our rhythm.
Congratulations on the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, by the way. How are you feeling? It’s a significant event at any time, let alone now that we’re staring down the barrel of the next four years.
I’m of two minds, right? Because I’m like, “Oh, whee, let’s rip that motherfucker a new one.” But then I’m like, “This isn’t necessarily about that. It’s about journalists and how we appreciate them and give them a light roasting.” So I think it’s going to have to be a little bit of both, because it’s their time and it’s their event and it’s their moment, so they should get some shine. But it is getting overpowered by, “Is Trump going to be there?” Blech.
But I tell you this, if he is there, if he’s not there, I’m saying the same fucking shit. It’s just like, “Will I be pointing over there or not? Will the fucker be there or not?” I feel like if I did anything less than complete scorched earth, then they’d be like, “Oh, something happened to her brain because I’ve heard her talk before.”
As somebody who enjoys a good political roast, scorched earth sounds pretty good right about now.
I can’t help it. We all feel it. That’s the only good part of it — it scratches this itch we all have to have people get roasted, which is this new social bananas thing, right? Because I feel like it’s MSNBC whose people just be going off. Joy Reid will read a bitch. Her name should be Joy Reid-A-Bitch, because she be hurting people’s feelings. And it’s like, it feels so good. And then you get your news and then you get the feeling of like, “Okay, I’m not alone.” So it’s become socially acceptable to really hurt a person’s feelings, which I don’t believe in, except for a few cases. Which I have never done, except many times, publicly.
I think it’s become a placeholder for doing things. I think instead of people getting up, writing the stupid letter to your stupid congressman, leaving your stupid congressman a stupid voicemail, which we have to do, it’s fun to just tweet “This congressman has a floppy butt.”
The theater gays are going to eat me alive if I don’t ask you about musicals, so is there anything that you can share at this time about your forthcoming Bigfoot show?
Yes, it rules.
No further questions, Your Honor.
We’re doing it at MCC [Theater] in March! That’s what I can share. And it’s cute. And boy, oh boy, it’s undergoing a rewrite. They got me out here writing. What it was when we did it at 54 Below and then at New York Stage and Film, it is completely different [now]. So we’ll see how it goes.
It is still evolving, which I think is nice. But I’m trying to keep this motherfucker 90 minutes. I don’t like an intermission, I want to go fast. I don’t think comedies should be longer than 90 minutes. Few comedies should even reach 90 minutes. So I’m trying to keep it under control, but we’ll see what happens, because I also won’t stop adding songs. I’m just not going to do it. Not going to stop adding songs, so too fucking bad. They’ll be like, “But where does this take place?” That had to get edited out. No room for that.
Nobody knows where Bigfoot is. That’s the whole thing.
No one knows. The show is about an inept mayor who’s destroying the town, and then Trump won, and we were like, “We better hurry up. This just got terribly topical. It’s horribly topical.”
Have you felt pressure to make it more topical in response to everything?
Girl, it is like we wrote it a year from now. That’s how it has always been. Every day I’m like, “It’s only becoming more topical.” I was trying to have fun. But nope, I guess not.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Have I Got News for You airs Saturdays at 9 ET on CNN.
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