


Amber Ruffin made a mockery of the White House Correspondents’ Association on Monday after she was dropped as the headliner of its annual fundraising dinner to ensure that the event’s “focus is not on the politics of division.”
The “Late Night” writer crashed Seth Meyers’ show to cut the host off as he was about to make a punchline about a man who robbed a New York City bodega.
“See, Seth, the problem is that’s divisive. Take it from me, if there’s one thing I learned from this weekend is you have to be fair to both sides,” she declared.
“Yeah but that doesn’t make sense in this case, there’s an innocent bodega owner. There’s a burglar,” Meyers argued.
“Or, hear me out, there are very fine people on both sides,” said Ruffin in a nod to President Donald Trump’s infamous comment following a deadly white supremacist in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
Ruffin’s surprise “Late Night” appearance arrives after the WHCA announced Saturday that it would axed her comedic performance from the dinner, just days after she referred to the Trump administration as “kind of bunch of murderers” on an episode of “The Daily Beast” podcast.
In the podcast episode, Ruffin said she was told “to be equal and make sure that you give it to both sides and ... I was like, there’s no way I’m going to be freaking doing that dude.”
“It’s bonkers that we’re still acting like things are normal,” she said.
WHCA President Eugene Daniels, who said Ruffin was “immediately at the top of my list” of candidates to headline the dinner in February, told members on Saturday that he wanted to make sure the dinner’s focus was “entirely” on colleagues’ work and providing scholarship and mentorship to future journalists.
Ruffin, in her “Late Night” appearance, responded to Meyers’ claim that when people are “objectively terrible we should be able to point it out on television.”
“I thought that, too, on Friday. But today is Monday and Monday’s ‘Amber Ruffin knows that when bad people do bad things, you have to treat them fairly and respectively,’” she said.
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“When you watch ‘The Sound of Music,’ you have to root for the singing children and the other people,’” she added, referring to the Nazis in the classic film.