Amber Ruffin did not need to be convinced to join CNN’s new comedy-news talk series “Have I Got News for You.” In fact, her role on the show — which is to joke about the news with Roy Wood Jr. and Michael Ian Black — is what she says she’d be doing anyway. So why not spend her Fridays talking about Trump in front of cameras?
Ruffin wasn’t familiar with the British version when she was approached to star in CNN’s show – “They have so many panel shows over there. We don’t do that unless it’s five angry women in the morning,” she quipped – but she was immediately game. “It’s the lightest lift that has ever lifted,” she told TheWrap. “Because if you think about it, sitting around and talking about the news was what I was going to be doing anyway, and odds are I’m probably doing it with Roy.”
Not that Ruffin has abundant free time. She’s a successful comedian, hosted her own late night show, has been a writer and performer on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” for a decade, got nominated for a Tony for writing the Broadway musical “Some Like It Hot” and co-hosts a podcast with her sister. But as Ruffin tells it, getting good at one thing means you get to learn how to do another thing, and “Have I Got News for You” was an opportunity to flex her improv roots.
“The reward for getting good at short-form improv is you get to write late night, which is like, you get to learn how to do a whole new thing. You already got good at something, and now you got to switch. Then you get good at late night and the reward is like, maybe you could write a book. Well, great, but I just figured this out. Then maybe you could write a musical,” Ruffin said with a mix of faux exhaustion and candor. “I am so blessed, and I’m so lucky, and I thank my lucky stars every day, but I am so tired of learning how to do new stuff.”
“Have I Got News for You” is an adaptation of a popular, long-running British program that pits Ruffin against Michael Ian Black, each with their own celebrity guest teammate, while Roy Wood Jr. plays the role of host. Wood reads news headlines, at which Ruffin, Black and the guests chime in with their own quips and jokes in a battle of who knows the most news.
The show airs on Saturday nights on CNN, part of a move into the late night realm for the cable news network that has been buoyed by airings of HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher” on Saturday nights too.
The performer said the show is “a lot of giggling at your funny friends” but noted that Black is a newshound. “He’s pretty plugged in,” she added. But her comedic chops (and background in short-form improv) make Ruffin a perfect fit for this format, delivering zinger after zinger accompanied by her infectious laugh.
The new gig doesn’t mean Ruffin is leaving her day job, though. Weekly episodes of “Have I Got News for You” tape on Fridays to air on Saturdays, but for the rest of the week she’s at 30 Rock. And she insists she’ll never leave.
“I’ve been on ‘Late Night With Seth Meyers’ since Day One, I’ll never leave,” she said, before turning the tables. “And they’ll never fire me. They don’t have the guts!”
Ruffin, who serves as a writer on the show but also appears in beloved recurring segments like “Amber Says What” and “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell,” said working on the NBC series has become how she processes the news each day. “I ingest the news and then out comes a sketch. I ingest the news and then out comes a little think piece,” she explained.
Those think pieces ballooned into her own late night talk show, “The Amber Ruffin Show,” which ran for three seasons on Peacock from 2020 to 2022. The series debuted in the immediate wake of the murder of George Floyd and spawned numerous viral moments as Ruffin emphatically and candidly spoke about what was happening in the world.
“The Amber Ruffin Show” was quietly canceled, and when asked about the reasons behind the cancellation Ruffin smiled, thought for a moment, then declined to get into it. “I gotta skip it. I’m too wild,” she said before acknowledging that the show was exactly what she wanted it to be and she “enjoyed every freaking second of it.”
“Everything we did on that show was exactly how it looked in my brain. So it was so nice to get to live in the silly, dreamy little world where it was me and my little best friends writing exactly what our hearts wanted to, addressing the pieces of news that were important to us instead of what we thought might appeal to the masses, and just getting to see to what degree that was successful,” she said with a smile. “People do feel exactly the way you feel. That’s the top line from that time. Everybody’s running around thinking the same things you’re thinking, which felt really, really great.”
News hasn’t always been such a cornerstone of late night talk shows, but “Late Night” launched and leaned into covering the news at a time when the landscape was shifting – Jon Stewart was leaving “The Daily Show,” David Letterman was exiting “Late Show” and the entire format felt up for grabs. “The Amber Ruffin Show” was an extension of that, and Ruffin sees CNN’s expansion into comedy as a natural next step.
“It used to be the f–king Carnac the Magnificent, you know? No one was talking about the news to this extent. No one’s doing a deep dive on abortion laws. The marriage of late night comedy and news is fairly new,” she said. “So, of course, the next evolution of that is comedy to have worked its way onto CNN. So I do think the two things are starting to become one, and I’m very interested in seeing where this goes.”
