Comedian dropped by White House correspondents hits back: ‘I would have been so terrifically mean’

A comedian whose skit for White House reporters was canceled for fear of upsetting Donald Trump skewered the journalists who dropped her in a biting late-night talk show routine mocking their perceived subservience to the president.

“I thought when people take away your rights, erase your history and deport your friends, you’re supposed to call it out. But I was wrong,” Amber Ruffin said during a brief appearance Monday on NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers.

“Glad to find that out now, because if they had let me give that speech, ooh baby… I would have been so terrifically mean.”

Ruffin was dropped at the weekend from the 26 April White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner when the group decided its “focus is not on the politics of division”. As a comedy writer for Meyers and host of her own chat show on Peacock, Ruffin has frequently mocked or criticized Trump and his actions.

Talking with Meyers, she ridiculed the advice she said she had received from the WHCA ahead of the dinner, which she relayed on a Daily Beast podcast Friday, “to be, you know, equal and make sure that you give it to both sides and blah blah blah…

Her invitation to be the dinner’s headline act was revoked Saturday after she said there was “no freaking way” she would acquiesce.

“If there’s one thing I learned from this weekend, it’s you have to be fair to both sides,” Ruffin told Meyers, who replied that: “When people are objectively terrible, we should be able to point it out on television.”

“I thought that too… on Friday,” Ruffin said.

“But today is Monday. And Monday’s Amber Ruffin knows that when bad people do bad things, you have to treat them fairly and respectfully. When you watch The Sound of Music, you have to root for the singing children and the other people.”

“You mean the Nazis?” Meyers said, referring to Trump’s comment that there were “good people on both sides” at a 2017 white supremacist rally in Virginia in which a civil rights activist was killed.

“I mean, it’s just the whole reason we have a free press is so we can report stories, you know, as they actually happen.”

“No,” Ruffin replied. “We have a free press so that we can be nice to Republicans at fancy dinners. That’s what it says in the first amendment.”

The exchange began when Meyers introduced a story about a burglar who raided a New York convenience store, and Ruffin stepped in claiming she needed to stop him delivering a punchline making fun of the offender because it would be “divisive”.

“But that doesn’t make sense in this case. You know, there’s an innocent bodega owner. There’s a burglar,” Meyers said.

“Hear me out, there are very fine people on both sides,” Ruffin said, claiming that the burglar was providing “an innovative ventilation system” when he shattered a glass door, and “received a micro loan” when he stole money from the register.

The sketch ended with Ruffin, a host of the satirical game show Have I Got News for You on CNN, declaring she needed to return the dress she had rented for the WHCA dinner.

“I already took the tags off, but I’m a just say they blew off in the wind,” she said.

“But that’s lying, Amber. That’s wrong,” Meyers said.

Ruffin replied: “You can’t say that. That’s journalism.”