Amber Ruffin’s Year of Making the World Better (and Funnier)

The White Elephant gift exchange was going well. Then the designer bags came out.

“It was bananas,” Amber Ruffin tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “Everything started out nice, but, man, once those bags were introduced to the environment…”

The comedian/actor/TV host/producer/writer/recent toast of Broadway was talking to The Daily Beast’s Obsessed after receiving a bounty of gifts.

First, an award nomination. Her Peacock series, The Amber Ruffin Show, was just nominated for a Critics Choice Award for Best Talk Show. It stands alongside veterans like Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and Late Night With Seth Meyers, the series on which she had her first big break as a writer and on-camera correspondent. She also, as it happens, was just at a Neiman Marcus party, where people, as she describes, were going feral at the gifting options.

If you’re not familiar with the game of White Elephant, the idea is that people choose a gift in sequential order, but each successive person has the option of stealing an item from a previous recipient instead of choosing a new one. Suffice it to say, typically the options don’t include a Bottega Veneta handbag or a Versace robe. “Usually I try to bring a jokey gift,” Ruffin says, “and then just end up bringing alcohol.”

When she showed up to the event, part of Neiman Marcus’ “Make the Moment” holiday campaign, she had resigned herself to being an observer. “I’m not the fanciest fancy-stuff person,” she says. Instead, she walked away with a prized item: a rhinestone-studded karaoke set. “I was like, if there was one thing on Earth I would have wanted…” It’s a unique person who, when presented with that buffet of designer duds, walks away with a bedazzled karaoke machine. “And be thrilled about it!” Ruffin adds.

The holiday season turns out to be the perfect time to catch up with Ruffin. She’s kind of…everywhere. The season finale of The Amber Ruffin Show premieres Friday, Dec. 16. On Sunday, Some Like It Hot, the Broadway musical she wrote the book for, based on the 1959 classic movie starring Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe, opened. It was also just announced that she’ll be pulling the same duty for an upcoming (and first-ever) Broadway revival of The Wiz.

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She’s no longer a “breakout star”—that status was better fitting when The Amber Ruffin Show premiered in 2020, or when it received its first Emmy nomination last year. But, at a time when the world has been going on years of darkness and chaos, you kind of want to decompress with someone whose job it is to distill all the madness through sharp comedy—and who seems to be finding a way to have fun through it all. Plus, she just really likes the holidays.

When we speak, she’s getting ready to go to her company’s holiday party. “Right now I’m wearing a friggin’ maroon velvet holiday suit,” she says. “Remember when you were young and the weird librarian or whatever would just go too far for every holiday, wearing crazy stuff? That's me now. I would never have guessed I'd grow up to be here.”

Ruffin’s background is in improv comedy and theater. When I mention holiday traditions, she begins, “Well, I was in Amsterdam for a while. I lived all over the place.” Before Meyers invited her to join Late Night as a writer, she had worked in Denver, Chicago, Los Angeles, and, yes, Amsterdam. (Now that she’s been rooted in New York for a decade, she says her tradition is to make cookies. According to her, they’re worse every year. You’d think that they’d get better over time with experience. “Yes, that's what you would think,” she says. “But that is not what is currently happening to my motor skills.”)

For three seasons now, Ruffin has hosted her own topical talk show on Peacock. It’s in the style of The Daily Show and, naturally, Late Night—but also entirely her own.

The Amber Ruffin Show is an outlet for her take on the news of the week, filtered through her own silly, smart, and skeptical perspective. Sometimes she’s petty. Sometimes she’s righteous. The goal is to strike the tricky balance between informative and cathartic, or, even more impossibly, urgent yet distracting. A personal favorite episode is the Season 2 premiere, in which she discussed racial bias in credit scores, sang a song about news being so bad “I pretend it doesn’t exist,” and ranted about a trivial issue from 1995 that still bothers her (the radio edit of TLC’s “Waterfalls” excluding Lisa “Left Eye” Lopez’s rap).

That means that Ruffin, in these last years, has found herself in a rarefied group: comedians that we spiraling plebeians turn to for help processing the news that, try as we might, we can’t pretend doesn’t exist. That seems like a lot of pressure. For Ruffin, it’s also therapeutic.

“It's the best! When you have to write jokes about how terrible the world is, it makes how terrible the world is less terrible,” she says. “Jokes about the news gives you a different perspective on it.”

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One of the segments she’s most proud of from the show is “How Did We Get Here?” It’s become a staple: With the help of researchers and writers, Ruffin unpacks a part of our history that should be both controversial and illuminating—but of which most of us are totally ignorant. Previous iterations have included everything from the outrage over critical race theory to the benefits of spending money on social services.

“There’s always a crazy feeling of ‘this history was hidden from me,’” she says. There’s a version of these sketches that is intensely emotional, but that’s not how Ruffin feels about them. “The way I feel about those segments is, like, gossip. Like, historical gossip. Because, for better or worse, it was kept secret from you. It's your history and someone looked at it and chose to omit it in order to keep it a secret from you. So it feels like telling someone's secrets, but you're allowed to and you're only better for it.”

Gossiping about history turns out to be just one of the many jobs Ruffin has this year. As of Sunday night, she’s officially the writer of a Broadway musical, after Some Like It Hot had its opening. On the scale of surreal things in her career, that tops the list. Specifically, watching the cast perform at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade tops the list.

“We not only got to watch it, which you know, after years of working on it, I'll never get enough of. But we got to watch people watch it,” she says. “Seeing how they enjoyed it was really,—this is cheesy—but it did make my holiday.”

Next on the docket is The Wiz, the just-announced revival that will “ease on” back to Broadway in 2024. There’s a lot of pressure on the show, given its cultural history. Ruffin is already feeling it.

“I cannot believe I get to work on The Wiz. I also can't believe how hard The Wiz is,” she says. “It’s tough, man. When you think back on The Wiz, or even The Wizard of Oz, you don't think about the story. You think about each moment. So writing it has been just a series of me getting out of my own way. Because we came to sing along to these songs, man.”

That there’s a film version of the musical and a reputation to contend with is also a blessing and a curse.

“I feel like you don't owe the stage production. You don't owe the movie. What you owe is people's memories of it. I want to honor the memory of it. So what I don't remember is, like, the police mice,” she says, wheezing with laughter. “So I'm super happy to omit that shit.”

All of this is to say that, in a complicated time, it’s a nice time to be Amber Ruffin. “I feel like I'm doing OK. I feel like I've been having a lot of fun, and that's always my only goal. And I feel like I'm getting to create a lot of new stuff. That's another goal. Spoiled is how I feel.” With that rhinestone karaoke machine, we understand why.

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