Making good on a booking that was apparently arranged before she was disinvited from this past weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Amber Ruffin spent a good portion of her Tuesday night visit to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert discussing her very public dismissal.
Indicating that she wasn’t given much (if any) of a heads-up before news broke on Saturday March 29th that the White House Correspondents Association had unanimously decided to drop her from the dinner, Ruffin told Colbert, “I was really, really sad for like two hours. But then I had a brunch, [and] then I felt great.”
“I thought if they didn’t want me doing that show before I had even opened my mouth, then they would have been really, really sad with what they got,” she added.
Though the WHCA did not state explicitly why it dropped her, days earlier Ruffin indicated that she had no intention of joking about both sides. Describing her rationale to Colbert last night, she explained, “We are at a point now where one side is snatching people up off the street and putting them on a plane and the other side is, you know, not doing that. So I just thought it would be impossible to make jokes about both sides.”
Asked by Colbert to share some of the jokes she’d planned, Ruffin demured, adding “After they fired me, I looked back at my Google doc and was like, this would have been bad. They would not have liked it.”
While she’s no stranger to late night as a longtime writer/performer on Late Night with Seth Meyers, a team captain on Have I Got News For You, and the former host of her own late-night show on Peacock, Ruffin’s visit with Colbert Tuesday night marked her first-ever Late Show appearance, and she seemed grateful for the opportunity.
“Thank you for having me here, because I didn’t do the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” she told Colbert. “I thought I was going to be here talking about some ‘Oh, yeah, I did such a good job’ or ‘Well, it’s a tough house’–one of those two. I didn’t think I’d be here going, ‘Yeah, well, my big mouth got me in trouble.'”
