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Amber Ruffin, comedian, asks athletes: 'Does it surprise you that you did such an amazing job?



Amber Ruffin, comedian and host of “The Amber Ruffin Show” on Peacock, NBC’s streaming platform, added a twist to post-match interviews with athletes as part of her on-the-ground coverage of the Games from Tokyo.

“The interviewers ask stressful questions like, ‘Do you know that everyone’s counting on you?’” Ruffin said in a gruff voice in one video, wagging her finger at the camera.

But not Ruffin. Her style hit a slightly lighter note.

“Question number one: Do you know you did an amazing job?” Ruffin asked athletes including Sarah Sponcil and Kelly Cales, two American beach volleyball players, as they left competition venues.

Ruffin also spoke with players from Canada, Kenya and Switzerland, injecting her questions with some feel-good comedic relief that elicited laughs from all of the athletes.

Ruffin, a former writer and performer on “Late Night With Seth Meyers,” was covering her first Olympics. In addition to her exit interviews, Ruffin also featured segments like “Athletes Tell Jokes” and even competed in her own Olympic event she dubbed “artistic weight lifting.”

Ruffin is not the only one making the Olympics funnier. The comedian Leslie Jones is using Twitter and Instagram to share her real-time reactions to practically every event, infused with the same enthusiasm and passion she brought to past Olympics and to “Game of Thrones.” And the comedian and actor Kevin Hart and the rapper Snoop Dogg, who are co-hosting a highlights show on Peacock, recently went viral for their commentary on one of the Games’s equestrian events in which they describe how a horse is doing the crip walk through its routine.