NEED TO KNOW
Leslie Jones made us laugh out loud on Saturday Night Live — usually.
Jones, 58, opened up about one of her sketches that didn’t quite work on the Oct. 30 episode of Vulture’s Good One podcast, hosted by Jesse David Fox. It was a sketch with Chris Rock, where they played a couple who are constantly fighting.
Fox called it one of the biggest bombs in “modern SNL history.” He said, “I say this with love, but it truly was like this was on television and no one laughed.”
Jones thought that it bombed because she froze mid-sketch, but Fox said it was because people didn’t seem to know what the joke was.
Dana Edelson/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
Jones explained, “The joke was is that we’ve been with each other so long that we just been arguing, but we love each other. We’re driving our kid crazy with how we argue, and then we’re like ‘No I love you mama.’ ”
But Jones’ issues with the sketch were logistical, since it was her first “major sketch.” She had joined the series the season before as a writer, but had become part of the cast during that 2014-2015 season.
“I didn’t understand the color of the pens [on the cue cards],” she said. “I didn’t know that the host is always black, and then I had blue. They didn’t tell me what my color was. So I didn’t know what my lines were.”
That meant during the sketch, she was frozen. “So I’m sitting there trying to put the earring on and the stage manager’s like ‘Leslie! Leslie! Leslie! Leslie,’ ” she said, mimicking his shouts. “I’m surprised they didn’t hear him on camera.” She called the experience “terrible.”
Will Heath/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty
“I was so I freaked out and I afterwards I felt like I was just going to just jump into the river,” she said. But “every castmember” was supportive after. “I remember Vanessa Bear sitting down next to me and going, ‘It’ll never happen again, will it?’ And I was like, ‘Damn, you guys are so good.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, it’s happened to everyone.’ ”
She also remembered series producer Lorne Michaels coming to talk to her. He told her, “It’s live, baby. It happens.”
Jones ended her SNL tenure in 2019.
Back in January, Jones spoke to PEOPLE to celebrate SNL’s 50th anniversary. She remembered her audition for the show back in December 2013 — and addressed the rumor that people don’t laugh during auditions.
“Not during my s—!” she said.
She continued, “Let me tell you something. It’s so funny. I was cocky as f—. I was like, ‘Oh, I’m the funniest s— that walked in this mother—–.’ That’s how I was.”
But when she was cast and arrived to her first table read, she realized, “Everybody was brilliant.”
“F—ing Cecily [Strong] had seven voices inside of her head that she was doing at random. This motherf—er was doing all kinds of accents,” she continued. “This bitch, I literally was totally intimidated when I got at the table, but the auditions? Man, I walked in there, I was like, ‘Yeah, move to the front. Y’all in the back, move to the front. I don’t perform like that.'”
“I was a cocky ass bitch and they moved to the f—ing front because that’s what the f— I said,” she said. “And then when I finished I was like, ‘My name is Leslie Jones. Peace.’”
