Amber Ruffin says she looked “100 percent with child.” She wasn’t pregnant—although strangers would have assumed that—but carrying two grapefruit-sized fibroids, one lodged inside her uterus, causing contractions so painful she’d find herself doubled over, wondering whether she needed the hospital.

Twenty seconds later, she’d be joking again.

For more than a decade, Amber Ruffin, Tony- and Emmy-nominated comedian, actress, and writer, has made a career out of transforming unbearable realities into something audiences can sit with long enough to understand them. First through improv stages in Omaha and Amsterdam, then as the first Black woman writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers, and now as one of America’s sharpest political comedians on the panel of CNN’s Have I Got News for You, Ruffin has perfected a style that turns horror into clarity without softening its edges.

But the closer her comedy has moved toward politics, race, queerness, and women’s bodies, the more personal it has become.

In 2022, she became one of the first comedians to openly discuss uterine fibroids, a condition that eight out of ten Black women will develop by the age of fifty, speaking candidly about her experience both in the media and online.