In 2014, Leslie Jones made headlines as a new Saturday Night Live member by delivering an incendiary joke about slavery. The bit received mixed reviews, but Jones, as it turned out, didn’t care; she’s funny, she knows it, and she spent decades fighting for her success.
In her new New Yorker profile, Jones comes across as world-weary and stalwart, a comedy veteran in a rough landscape. As Chris Rock is quoted as saying:
“Black women have the hardest gig in show business. You hear Jennifer Lawrence complaining about getting paid less because she’s a woman—if she was black, she’d really have something to complain about.”
At 46 years old, Jones admits that she’s relieved that her role on SNL and upcoming part in the female-redux Ghostbusters came about today, instead of decades earlier.
“I’m glad this whole success thing is happening now,” she said. “I can’t even imagine a twenty-three-year-old Leslie in this position. They would have kicked me off the set after two days. I would have fucked half the dudes in the crew. I was a less confident person back then. And damn sure not as funny.”
Before she got her SNL cast member role, she was one of the many black women comedians who felt they were ready for a shot on the show but weren’t given an opportunity. Here’s what she said on the Alias Smith and LeRoi podcast in response to SNL’s initially half-hearted search for women of color to be cast members, and the lame joke about the show’s diversity shortcomings when host Kerry Washington played several different black women in one sketch because there was just no one else: