Following her dismissal as roast master for this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, out comedian Amber Ruffin appeared on Late Night this week to parody the apparent bothsidesism that led to the White House Correspondents’ Association’s (WHCA) decision.

On the Monday, March 31 episode of Late Night, where Ruffin is a writer, host Seth Meyers referenced a Saturday, March 29 letter from WHCA President Eugene Daniels announcing Ruffin’s dismissal, in which Daniels, a gay man, wrote that he wanted to ensure that this year’s event did not focus on “the politics of division.”

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Event organizers told her to mock both Republicans and Democrats equally. She refused and called the current administration “a bunch of murderers.”

Daniels’s announcement followed Republican criticism of Ruffin’s Thursday, March 27 appearance on The Daily Beast Podcast, where she described Republican lawmakers as “kind of a bunch of murderers” and said that she had refused the WHCA’s request that she roast both Republicans and Democrats equally.

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“They want that false equivalency that the media does,” Ruffin said of Republicans. “It makes them feel like human beings, but they shouldn’t get to feel that way because they’re not.”

On Late Night, Meyers said that as a “big fan of Amber Ruffin” he would have liked to hear what she had to say at the event. Then as he was setting up a joke about a Brooklyn bodega robbery, Ruffin rushed onto the set telling the host she was concerned about where he was going with the joke.

Meyers said he was going to make fun of the guy who robbed the bodega.

“See, Seth, the problem is, that’s divisive,” Ruffin argued. “Take it from me, if there’s one thing I learned from this weekend, it’s you have to be fair to both sides.”

Ruffin joked that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the hypothetical robbery, echoing the president’s 2017 line about white supremacist demonstrators.

Meyers countered 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.”

Meyers pointed out that “the other people” in the film were Nazis.

“Calling them that is so one-sided,” Ruffin joked.

When Meyers argued that the point of the free press is to report stories truthfully, Ruffin joked that “we have a free press so that we can be nice to Republicans at fancy dinners.”

“The point is, you’re sowing the seeds of discord,” she continued. “And I used to be the same way. 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.”

She added that she was glad she found that out, because had the WHCA let her perform, “Ooh, baby, I would have been so terrifically mean!”

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