Seth Can and Does Tell Some Jokes He Shouldn’t

Regular viewers of Late Night With Seth Meyers — or, let’s be honest, regular visitors to the show’s YouTube page — will be familiar with the format of its recurring segment “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell.” It’s a delightful staple in which Meyers’s writers Amber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel join him at his desk to help deliver the punch lines of jokes about Black, lesbian, or female identity that, by virtue of his being a straight white man, would be ill advised for him to read. Caught up in the merriment of it all, Ruffin and Hagel then convince Meyers that he’s in a safe space and that he should deliver one of the punch lines himself. He takes them at their word, they immediately clutch their pearls at whatever he says, and he ends the segment by declaring, “Black women and lesbians are liars!” Well, in honor of the 50th edition of “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” on November 21, Ruffin and Hagel really leaned into the “lying.”

Meyers set up the segment as usual, but then the show cut to an animation in which Ruffin and Hagel explain that they’ve planned “a fun surprise” to mark the occasion and that “Seth does not know what’s about to happen.” The pair entered to fanfare on a red carpet, decked out in regal dresses, gloves, and tiaras. “Now, is it going to be the same script we read earlier today?” a frightened Meyers asked them as soon as they sat down. “No, it will not,” Ruffin cackled. “We wrote a whole script for nothing!” “We met three different times on it!” Meyers interjected.

Finally, Ruffin and Hagel unveiled their master plan — a sort of Oops! All Berries version of the segment. They read the setups to the jokes, and Meyers, much to his dismay, read the punch lines. And the pair did not take mercy on the uncomfortable host. “A team of all Black women is planning to climb Mount Kilimanjaro next year,” Ruffin volleyed at one point. “Word has it, there’s a nail salon at the top,” Meyers said. Here’s to 50 more segments of “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell,” at which point Ruffin and Hagel will presumably celebrate by forcing Meyers to commit a hate crime on the air.