Every week, Late Night Last Week highlights some of the best late night TV from the previous week. In this week’s late night TV recap, we tackle the WHCA’s decision to disinvite Amber Ruffin, the end of Taylor Tomlinson’s After Midnight, Ronny Chieng mocking Signalgate, and John Oliver on tasers.
Buckle up, folks. It’s been a busy week in late-night television.
On Saturday, in the latest example of Profiles in Whatever Is the Opposite of Courage, the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) disinvited Amber Ruffin, the longtime Late Night with Seth Meyers writer and former host of The Amber Ruffin Show, from hosting this year’s WHCA dinner. Instead, they have opted to have no comedian this year. Always a good sign for a lively democracy.
The decision came after Ruffin made critical comments about the WHCA and Trump administration on The Daily Beast Podcast, co-hosted by Joanna Coles and decorated late-night veteran Samantha Bee. The upshot: the WHCA said Ruffin had to poke fun at both sides equally, to which Ruffin said she responded, “There’s no way I’m going to be freaking doing that.”
Coles was quick to point out how ludicrous the idea was, considering that the Republicans, if you haven’t heard, control all three branches of government. The jokes are almost always made at the expense, primarily, of the party in power. Has the WHCA never heard of a court jester before?
CNN, where Ruffin also works as part of the news game show Have I Got News For You,noted that the decision came amid tensions between the WHCA and the Trump White House, including the administration’s recent decision to ban the Associated Press over refusing to label the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. In this column two weeks ago, we highlighted Ruffin making a joke about this precise topic: “Now you care about deadnaming?”
As always, it is those who talk tough and tough on “free speech” that end up being the greatest policers of comedy, especially when it pokes fun at the powerful. The move recalls the 2018 controversy surrounding Michelle Wolf, who delivered a devastating and hilarious set deemed too shocking for the moment. But at least she had a chance to speak. Media reporter Brian Stelter shared that plans to remove Ruffin were already in place even before the podcast appearance.
And don’t forget 2006, when Stephen Colbert delivered a takedown of George W. Bush in what was not only the greatest WHCA dinner performance of all time, but indeed one of the finest pieces of satire in American history. The following year, the WHCA opted to invite Rich Little, who, with all due respect to the great impressionist, was a painfully safe choice, and deemed one at the time.
Of course, the other great irony is that perhaps no venue has been more critical of the Democrats than the hosts and correspondents of late-night television, including Ruffin on Late Night. But the idea that there must be an equal number of jokes told at the expense of each party, when one is literally in power remolding the country in new ways every single day, is ridiculous. When I read that line, I immediately thought of one of Colbert’s 2006 declarations: “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Here’s one good bit of news. The Late Night staff was off last week. With some well-deserved rest, we can’t wait to see what Ruffin and the team make out of this news when the show returns tonight.
Let us now move on to a less existential, but still deeply sad bit of news. Despite a third season renewal, Taylor Tomlinson announced last week that she will leave After Midnight to return full time to stand-up. CBS promptly announced that they would be canceling the show entirely after the conclusion of this current season in June.
This column has long championedAfter Midnight, which remains one of the most original programs in late night. Sure, there are often swings and misses, but there is a freshness and life to each episode and its direct appeal to younger millennials and Gen Z. Unlike the 11:30 hour, one won’t find three different versions of the same Trump joke. Tomlinson’s monologues are often too short, yet they are consistently some of the strongest in late night. The more Tomlinson talks, the better the show is. Always a good correlation to have.
After Midnight had seemed to realize this too. It was slowly drifting away from the celebrity game show format. This season, they introduced a “couch segment,” during which Tomlinson had more of a chance to interact with her guests beyond the pseudo competition, which is mostly just a chance for comics to throw out zany, self-deprecating one-liners. Admittedly, the game show portion itself was always the show’s weakest part–not good considering it was also its core. The truth of the matter is game shows are only fun if we get to play along, like on Jeopardy! and Family Fued, or watch people make fools of themselves, like on Deal or No Deal and Family Feud.
The announcement came on Thursday, March 27, one of the days After Midnight aired a rerun to accommodate March Madness coverage. Thus, Tomlinson has not yet had a chance to address the news on air. “I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunity to be part of this incredible journey,” she said in a statement. “Though it was an extremely tough decision, I knew I had to return to my first passion and return to stand-up touring full-time.”
To be clear, Tomlinson is a fantastic stand-up, with a trio of superb Netflix specials already under belt. We can’t wait to see what she does next, but we also hope this is more of a “See ya later.” If and when Colbert decides to leave the Ed Sullivan Theatre, Tomlinson should be at the top of CBS’s list. Here’s Colbert, an executive producer on After Midnight, thanking Tomlinson and the crew for all of their work.
Sometimes, the comedy stars just beautifully align. Who better to host The Daily Show last week as Trump 2.0 faced its first “-gate” scandal than Ronny Chieng? Few are better at skillfully, restlessly, even gleefully calling out depraved stupidity than Chieng. On March 25, he summarized the events in the show’s new segment dedicated to Trump’s underlingings, “The Worst Wing.”
If you haven’t heard, the scandal is basically this: top Trump cabinet members, including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were caught sharing war plans in a signal group after National Security Advisor Mike Walz accidentally added the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to the chat. The information shared included war plans for US strikes in Yemen, which experts say could have endangered the lives of military members. And of course, the people in group chat lied and downplayed the whole thing, which, as always, made it worse because no one learns anything in this post-truth hellscape.
As the audience laughed along at the details of the story, Chieng had enough. “Laugh it up people,” he said. “Because unlike you, I have empathy for these people who are just trying their best to kill other humans.” Chieng warned that every audience member had a private chat that, if leaked, would ruin their lives. “If you told me that my group chats leaked and then told me it was just my missile attack one, I’d be like, Oh my God. Thank God. Thank God,” Chieng said.
John Oliver on Tasers
Meanwhile, over on HBO/Max, our friend John Oliver tackled the subject of tasers, a popular weapon of choice touted by police for being safe, especially when compared to regular guns. Oliver tackles the deceptive, cult-like business practices of the taser industry, and disproves many of the purported benefits of tasers, including showing statistics that demonstrate the use of tasers can actually escalate violence, especially when they are deployed in unnecessary circumstances.
Oliver goes all the way back to 2004, showing a CNN story on a Florida police department that used a taser on an elementary school student. He then played a question CNN put on the air for viewers to call in and answer: “Should police be able to use tasers on children?”
“That is a wild question to be asking,” Oliver said. “And also, that’s basically what the news was like in 2004: debating the ethics of tasering six-year-olds, in between manufacturing consent for the Iraq war.”
Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic, researcher, and late night comedy columnist, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He’s been writing Paste’s late night TV recaps since 2024. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.
