Yahoo News Amber Ruffin and Lacey Lamar on Late-Night TV Letting Black Women Down
Comedian Amber Ruffin is systematically taking over the entertainment industry. And now she’s bringing her sister Lacey Lamar along for the ride. With two books, and now a new podcast, the two are busier than ever—even as the Writers Guild strike has shut down much of Hollywood.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Ruffin talks about the state of late-night TV as a whole (and her eponymous Peacock show) and reflects on the Saturday Night Live audition that inadvertently brought a generation of Black female comedians together and led Seth Meyers to hire her as the first Black woman to write for a late-night network show. The sisters also reveal how they find humor in “everyday racism” and why they decided to embrace their true, deeply silly selves on their podcast.
“I think everything is all about me, but dang if this isn’t,” Ruffin says of her role at the center of the writers strike. “The Amber Ruffin Show, streaming services, late-night, Broadway, and the Tonys. I mean, I am having a time!”
It was just two days after the strike shut down late-night TV that Ruffin was nominated for her first Tony Award for writing the book of the new musical version of Some Like It Hot. At first, it seemed like the awards telecast might have to be scrapped altogether to appease the guild, but now, in a message of solidarity between screenwriters and playwrights, the show is expected to go on (without a script) on June 11.
As both a late-night writer and Tony nominee, Ruffin finds herself stuck between both worlds.
“I think it’s going to be a long strike,” she predicts. “And I also think that they’re acting like they’ve banked a thousand shows, and they haven’t. And they’re acting like they can turn to reality shows at any point because they have a lot, and they don’t.”
Trying to figure out how to make a topical comedy show work on streaming is “certainly a challenge,” Ruffin says, “but it’s a challenge for the people with money, not for me. I show up and bug out.”
‘Late Night’ Writer Sal Gentile Calls Out Studios’ ‘Insulting’ Strike Response
The hardest part, according to Ruffin, is that the streaming services don’t share their stats with the people who actually make the shows. “They know exactly how many people are watching it, but they will never tell you,” she says. And then they use that lack of information to pay writers less. “You used to be able to make a living off of writing a TV show and you can’t anymore,” Ruffin explains, adding, “It doesn’t have to be like this.”
And yet, despite most of Hollywood shutting down, Ruffin and her sister have remained remarkably busy with other projects.
“They asked Amber to write a book and Amber said, ‘Absolutely not. I don’t want to do that, but my sister has some unbelievable stories,’” Lamar recalls of their initial creative collaboration. You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism came out in 2021, followed the next year by The World Record Book of Racist Stories, which expanded the scope beyond their personal stories.
Lamar had been working at a retirement home in Omaha, Nebraska, where the sisters grew up, and would spend her days slyly journaling about the various acts of racism she encountered—just so she had something to show HR if necessary. The success of their projects together has finally allowed Lamar to leave her day job and focus solely on show business with her sister, including a new podcast from iHeartMedia and Will Ferrell’s Big Money Players Network called The Amber & Lacey, Lacey & Amber Show.
“It’s been great. I have zero complaints. I love it,” Lamar says. “I don’t have to sit in dumb meetings. And I don’t have to write stuff down anymore and take it to HR.”
Meanwhile, Ruffin’s rise in the late-night comedy world has coincided with the racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder in the spring of 2020. In the days afterward, Meyers opened each episode of his show by asking Ruffin to speak openly—and notably without jokes—about her own experiences with cops who singled her out because she is Black.
“When stuff like that happens, I got to be honest, you don’t care what white people have to say,” Ruffin says now. “I love Seth to death, but I don’t care what that man has to say. So when everybody made more space for the Black creatives on their show, I thought that that was great, and I bet the result of it was me, Ziwe [Fumudoh] and Sam [Jay] getting late-night shows.”
Ruffin felt like “the tide had shifted” because “when your only option is white men, and then you see it in the light of 2020, you feel like an idiot.”
Cut to three years later, and HBO has canceled Pause with Sam Jay, Showtime has canceled Ziwe, and Peacock has reduced The Amber Ruffin Show to occasional one-off specials as opposed to a weekly series. When I ask Ruffin what that tells her, she replies, “I think it says we’re in America. Hi, welcome to America.”
Of course, Ruffin’s name was also among those being thrown around as a possible replacement for Trevor Noah when he stepped down as host of The Daily Show late last year. But like another female late-night host who came before her, Ruffin tells me she never even got the call to guest-host the show, explaining that she’s “under contract with Universal,” which would have made it complicated—if not completely impossible.
“But I love that people said that,” she adds. Asked if she would want the Daily Show gig if it was offered to her, Ruffin shrugs noncommittally. “One thing I need? More jobs!” she jokes. “You want one-twentieth of my attention? Hire me!”
Listen to the episode now and subscribe to The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Tuesday.
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