Amber Ruffin loves it when people say she’s nice, because she is. “But also — I’ll cut a (bleep that rhymes with ‘kitsch’),” she said with what is becoming increasingly known by the week as TV’s most mischievous smile.

“I can be both things. And I think being able to be seen as both of those things is mind-blowing. Like, I get to be a Black lady with nuance. There’s not a lot of people who get to do that. I can’t believe I am pulling it off, actually.”

She’s pulling that off, along with millions of legs, as the host of Peacock’s “The Amber Ruffin Show,” staff writer and occasional player on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” — she’s the first Black woman ever to write for a late-night U.S. network talk show, in fact — and co-writer of the new “Some Like It Hot” musical that opens on Broadway this fall. On Sunday (May 8), the Omaha native will headline the centerpiece evening of the eighth annual SeriesFest at Red Rocks.

Not bad for a woman who has described herself as “a stark, raving normal person.” One perfectly summarized by Melanie McFarland of salon.com as “a delightful guide through the trauma of everyday racism.”

And she gets away with it, for the most part, “because I love you so bad — and I think you can tell,” she said. Like when she tells this joke: “White privilege is having three men who might be your baby daddy, and still somehow being played by Meryl Streep.” It’s about the film “Mamma Mia.” But it’s about so much more.

Ruffin is the perfect humorist for these perfectly divided times, a warm and playful comedian whose brand of social medicine, be it about gun laws, racism, police brutality or senate filibustering over anti-lynching laws, goes down like a spoonful of sugar.

Well — usually. Last week, while guest-hosting on TV’s “The View,” Ruffin set social media ablaze when she said Donald Trump’s impending return to Twitter “is going to be horrible — but also very hilarious. We forget how hilarious Trump is.” Which caused fellow “View”-er Joy Behar to snap back humorlessly: “Trump is actually as funny as a herpes sore.” Ruffin took the burn, and the social afterburn, in stride.

“People love dunking on folks,” she said. “That’s fine. That’s the price of admission. Shoot, that’s one of the nicest, most gentle dunks I’ve ever frickin’ received. What are you gonna do?”

Ruffin’s visit to Denver next week is a homecoming. She lost her Denverginity in 2006 when she spent nearly a year here as a member of Chicago’s famed The Second City troupe developing and performing an original sketch comedy for the Denver Center called, yes, “How I Lost My Denverginity.”

“People don’t realize that Second City Denver was a thing, but it existed,” said Ruffin. To create a Denver-centric show required the cast to move here months in advance. And they dove into the Denver cultural scene more hardily than people who live in Denver dive into the Denver cultural scene. Ruffin and her castmates lived downtown at the swank Brooks Towers, the gig was the first regular paycheck of Ruffin’s life – and “we behaved terribly,” she said with a laugh.

They took what one cast member called the world’s most boring tour — of the Denver Mint. They crash-landed at the Molly Brown House, took the Coors Tour and invaded the People’s Fair. They ate at the Buckhorn Exchange and bucked up for a Colfax Avenue pub crawl. They even made the news when they got run off by security from MTV’s downtown “The Real World” house (although Ruffin did not attend that escapade).

Most delightfully, they lost their minds at Casa Bonita, the soon-to-reopen Mexican-themed restaurant with the 30-foot waterfall, cliff divers, fire jugglers, strolling mariachi bands, a pirate cave and addictive arcade games.

“Oh my God, we had the frickin’ best time,” Ruffin said. “I still remember we all got a little prize from the gift shop. It was the most fun I’ve ever had.”

That’s what she says now. At the time, Ruffin was more than a little envious of castmate Beth Melewski, who had turned hundreds of hard-won arcade-game tickets into a tiny pony. I remind Ruffin that, at the time, she was quoted as summarizing her Casa Bonita experience thusly: “I saw the land of disappointment! Stupid non-Pony!”

In that moment, the trauma came flooding back. “Oh yes, I’ll never forget that,” Ruffin said. “I remember how cute that pony was. I still want that pony.”

2006 was a formative year in Ruffin’s career. Eight years later, she was a staff writer on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” and became a household face performing a giggling recurring segment called “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell” with her “Denverginity” castmate, Jenny Hagel. Asked whether performing in “Denverginity” or meeting Meyers was more central to her present-day success, she doesn’t miss a comic beat.

“Oh, ‘Denverginity,’ times a million,” she said. “No, but Denver really was so much fun. It was like, ‘We’re going to send you out to Denver. … Good luck, bud!’ It was you against the world.”

About the only iconic venue Ruffin never visited during her year in Denver was perhaps its most quintessential tourist stop: Red Rocks, the historic, 11,000-seat amphitheater cut into the majestic base of the Rocky Mountains in Morrison.

Well, she’s about to lose her Morrisonirginity at SeriesFest.

“That’s the whole reason I am doing this show,” she joked, “because that whole time I was there, I never saw Red Rocks at all – and I think that is butt. When you live in Denver, Red Rocks is everywhere. Every night on the news they show you a sea of people who are flipping out and having the time of their lives because John Denver or whoever is at Red Rocks. I was always jealous that I never got to go. But now I do … yay!”

SeriesFest has grown into an incongruously signature Denver event that’s sort of like a film festival for upcoming television projects. Six days of events from May 5-11, most held at the Sie FilmCenter, will include in-competition screenings, panels, workshops and exclusive sneak peeks and TV premieres. The goal of the nonprofit organization is to champion and connect emerging artists in the world of episodic storytelling. So why is this all happening in Denver, a thousand miles from TV’s epicenter in Los Angeles?

“Because of Red Rocks, and how beautiful it is!” says Ruffin, whose headlining hybrid evening will include a little bit of all the things that people come to Red Rocks for — comedy, film and music.

The night will begin, as she describes it, “with a little standup from a young sweetie pie named Justine Mareno to get our blood pumping. Then we will show one of my favorite episodes of ‘The Amber Ruffin Show.’ ” (Don’t ask her which one, because she doesn’t know yet. “They’re all my frickin’ favorites,” she says.) That will be followed by the Boston alt-rock indie band Lake Street Dive.

“So it’s gonna start rowdy with Justine, and by the time we close out the night, we’ll all be behaving very badly,” Ruffin said.

SeriesFest week might sound like a thing for industry insiders, but Ruffin says it’s for anyone who loves television — and dreamers. To them, she says:

“My message is that if you are coming to SeriesFest, you are doing the right thing. Even if you don’t have a series of your own and you are coming to SeriesFest just to learn how people put their series out into the world, that’s great. You have to start somewhere. And if you did get into SeriesFest, that’s a pretty frickin’ big deal. If you are here, odds are you are on the right track.”

That’s easier for Ruffin to see than her own right track. She’s living the dream, but she can’t really explain it.

“I feel like none of this is real, only because, when I walk down the street … don’t nobody care,” she said. “I can remember every time someone said, ‘Hey, you’re Amber Ruffin!’ And every time it’s been because I still have on makeup. My hair is still all done. But me, waking up, shaking the dirt off and running around the city? You wouldn’t recognize me. I’m too raggedy. So it doesn’t really feel like a big deal to me.”